How To Build A Paying Audience Faster

 Full Transcript: 

 

Hello, my friends...

It's Jen Kilbourne Obermeier. Welcome back to my live video series.

I am happy to see you here! We are continuing on our discussion about creating an online business.

We have covered multiple topics so far.

If you guys have been watching, please, let me know that you've been watching.

Leave a comment, let me know what you want to hear more about.

Let me know what's confusing.

Let me know if you're in research mode or what you're up to with this online business stuff.

Hopefully, you guys are taking really good care of yourselves and your families lately.

 

We're going to talk today about something that -- hopefully, it's going to be a relatively quick discussion.

I know I tend to do these long, lengthy videos, but this is a next step of something we've been talking about.

This is about the fastest way to build your audience.

We have been talking about creating content, having a plan, having a strategy, cross-promoting it everywhere.

We've talked about doing videos on your Facebook page, downloading those, uploading them to YouTube so that people can find them, potentially cross-promoting your blog onto Pinterest, ways to get eyeballs that are searching for your content onto your stuff, your videos, your blog, back to your website, onto your email list.

We did a topic about email list.

Hopefully, you guys can start to see like how all of this is coming together.


Today, we are going to talk about something that is typically considered an advanced tactic, or what I think most people think is an advanced tactic, which is paying for traffic as opposed to putting it all out there and waiting for people to find it.

Now, everything is going to cost you one of two things in business and in life, it's either going to cost your time, which is generally what we've been talking about up until this point, or it's going to cost you some money.


Now, I think most people who are new to online business are thinking Facebook Ads are something that are way, way, way, way beyond their level of understanding or willingness or ability to even go there right now.

I want to demystify that upfront so that you can consider some of the strategies that I want to tell you about and why that actually might be not only the fastest way to build your audience, but something that can be done relatively cheaply, especially if you don't necessarily have time to be doing a lot of the downloading, uploading, get transcriptions, cross-promote all of your content all over the place.

That might cost you a lot of time in order to build that audience and bring them back to your page and what have you.


If you're willing to invest a little bit of money in building your business, if you can figure out how to find your people quickly using paid advertising strategies, it's going to save you a ton of time.

I'm going to just sort of imagine that I'm talking to someone who is building their coaching business, that's one potential online business that I know some people in this audience are interested in.


If you have built up a following or an email list of even a thousand people, you have more than enough.

You don't have to wait till you have a thousand, you have more than enough people that you can put out a another video or an email that has, "Hey, here's my coaching offer. Here's the next way to work with me."


Obviously, the quicker you can build up that thousand people who are genuinely interested, the quicker that you can be putting your paid service offer out there, like your coaching or maybe even your course, if that's something you've been working on, and actually get money back in the door.

This is not all for nothing, right? You want to monetize and make a business out of it, so let's talk a little bit about Facebook ads.


One thing we've been talking about when I described my Content Snowball strategy, I did a whole video on that the other day, is about putting yourself out there on live video.

I know that that's hard enough to even wrap your brain around, but the absolute fastest way to build an audience for your online business is to actually reuse some of the online live videos that you're doing from your Facebook page and to run those videos as ads, to a much, much, much wider potential audience of people on Facebook who would otherwise never see it.

We're going to talk about how you, how in general that you do that in Facebook Ads' dashboard interface.


When we're talking about an ad, that basically means any post that you...

An "ad" can be a written post, text or image or it can be a video.

Any type of post that you put on your Facebook page that you are putting some money behind in order to allow it to get more visibility to more people, it doesn't have to be whatever you might associate advertising with.

It doesn't have to be used selling something and it doesn't have to be you being sales-y at all or really only talking about your business.

You could be putting out your helpful content like we've been talking about.


Then, like I said, you're just putting money behind the posts.

We're going to call that a Facebook ad in general, but just the idea of it is just to get it more exposure, more traction, and visibility for what you do and what your expertise is.

Inside of the Facebook Ads back-end, which you would have access to as soon as you have a business Facebook page and you do all the setup for it, again, that's a little bit beyond the scope of what we're going to be able to talk about in this live video, just me and you talking.


There's a lot of tutorials online that I would definitely recommend digging into just so you understand the basics of this.

Go on YouTube and look for Facebook ad basic setup or basic tutorials and there are going to be tons that have already been put out there that are way better than what I could do, so there you have it.

YouTube, always the magical YouTube University resource...!

In your Facebook Ads back-end, when you're selecting an existing post, like a video to use as an ad, you can select for one of several objectives.

1. One is traffic, meaning your goal is to get traffic from your post to click through to your website. That will be one goal.


2. Another goal that they have is engagement.

This is the one that I want to focus on because your audience is going to be built out of people who are actually interested enough in your topic to watch some of your videos, so watching some of your video in this instance counts as engagement with your posts and is a very, very cheap way to build an audience.


I know I just breezed through that, but Facebook Ads are more expensive.

The more specifically you want to take them off of Facebook.



I'm not saying it's expensive-expensive compared to a lot of things, but traffic ads and conversion ads where you're really trying to sell something, like take them to a sales page and sell them something, those are more expensive than just regular engagement ads.

Engagement means they watched it, they commented on it, they shared it, they clicked Like, whatever.


What you're doing when you're running an engagement ad with a video is you're putting it out there in this great big ocean and you're getting people to raise their hand and go, "Oh, yeah, that's me."

Whatever your topic is there, they're opting themselves into your Facebook audience by taking one of those actions just to engage.

You're not even asking them... You're definitely not selling them anything and you're not asking them to even go and read a blog post off of Facebook.

You are just talking, you're sharing, you're being helpful, they're getting to know you.

Maybe that's the first time they've ever seen you.


When I'm saying they're "cheap," here's what I'm saying: I'm running an engagement ad on one of the videos that I made on this page last week.

I'm getting video views for half of a penny.

That's insane.

That means every hundred engagements or video views is costing me less than a dollar.

I mean, this is an average.

This is not every single one.

That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about how cheap the video views are.


Over time, now, sometimes that transfers into people just checking out your page, maybe liking your page.

That's not really your goal, but you want them to potentially check out your other content if they like what they see.

Over time, running these very cheap, like $5 a day that you're putting towards engagement on some of your most popular videos that already have comments and already have shares, if you are running those as engagement ads, then over time, you're fishing out there in the great big ocean and you're finding more and more people who really do love your content, so they do like your page, they do get live video notifications every time you do your live video series.


What I'm getting at here is this can be a very effective way to go get the people that you know need to be in your audience versus waiting for them to search for the right search term on YouTube or the right search term on Google and making sure that you've spent enough time to do your SEO so that your stuff shows up on Google's front page or on YouTube's search results or on Pinterest's search results.


That takes a lot of time and effort.

It doesn't cost as much money.

It takes a lot of time and effort and it's still a good thing to do, but as you can see...If you really want to launch something quickly and you want to build up the audience for it quickly that would actually be interested in what you're offering:Doing videos, specifically videos, not just any old posts that you're just putting out there, it is the cheapest ad objective that Facebook offers -- video engagement.


It's a good measure and you can see, say you put out a 10-minute video, how much of that video are people actually watching? If they even watched only a minute of it, they watched it for a whole minute. There's something there, right? There's something there that is letting you know that they're interested in that.


Here's the other key thing is that once people actually have watched your videos, they don't even have to ever like your page or visit your website.

You have the ability through Facebook ads to retarget all these people who've been watching your videos with another video or another post.


I'm not doing this right now, but let's say hypothetically because I told you guys, I'm not selling anything on this page, so I wouldn't be doing this, but I could, if I wanted to.

Let's say in Facebook Ads Manager, I created an audience of people who I can just select every, I can literally check-mark every one of my videos that I've done so far over the last 10 days and create an audience of people who have engaged with those videos or engaged with my page.

I don't even know how big that audience would be, but whatever.


I can create another post.

It doesn't even have to be a video.

It could just be a text and an image that says, "If you want to learn more or work with me, here's how you can go to my page," or maybe I created this fancy ebook that still was free, but it was my email opt-in.I can retarget that specific audience of people who've already watched some of my videos.

Even if it was only one minute of that 10-minute video, it doesn't matter, you can retarget all of those people with your email freebie.

We talked about that the other day with email marketing and growth.


Or you can do another video just for them that they only see because you're retargeting them as part of your audience, so therefore, you might be selling or you might be telling them more about what you offer in your services, but you're not putting it out there to the whole world, like, "Come buy my stuff."

You're just continuing to nurture the conversation with people that you know for sure already know you.


 This is something that, again, if you're going to be serious about online business, you at some point are going to need to teach yourself at least a few of the technical, what's the word? Facebook, I wouldn't call a technical tool.

It feels very technical or it feels very advanced and hard-to-understand for someone is not familiar at all with how all of that even works, but this, to me, is the number one secret to launching any business fast is because Facebook already knows everything about everybody for better or for worse.


You can use that.

You can use that information to find your people.

Let's say you're doing something that's a local like local service business.

You're not putting out there to the whole world.

You're just putting it out there to your metro area or what have you.


That was exactly how I launched my in-person service business.

This is part of my long business story, but I had an in-person service business and then I launched an online business.

My in-person service business, I got that off the ground with Facebook Ads.

I spent $5 on some Facebook Ads that were traffic ads and was running people to my new website and I got my very first client ever, ever paid me $2,200.

ROI, very big, like a million.


It's something worth getting relatively comfortable with just so you can at least understand that it is there and it is there for you and it works just as well with an online business as it does with the local business, obviously.

When you're doing something online, essentially, the whole world can be your potential audience.

You're not limited by who you can serve locally and so on.


 Now, let me talk about a few other ways that this could work for somebody who is not necessarily...I used the online coaching business as an example or an online course as an example.


Let's say you're someone who is in that category of people.

I talked about this a few days ago.

Let's say that you, your online business idea is just that you want to start a new blog and it's home decor stuff, so you've thought about how you're going to incorporate some of your own content, your own projects.

Maybe you do some posts, they're like, "Here's my 10 favorite lamps that are in the style of this home decor that I really like," or whatever.


 You've thought a lot about different types of content posts, but it's not necessarily about you selling a service or them getting to know you as a person.

You want more traffic for your blog because you know that once you get to 100,000 page views per month on your blog consistently, that you can just basically enable advertising on your blog and be making the passive income every month, not to say you don't still have to work at putting out good content on your blog, but one of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your website so that you can reach that threshold is to get it from Facebook.


It can be the same kind of process where you, you can do engagement ads for short videos.

It doesn't have to be videos of you talking.

It can be videos that you upload of something, like a behind-the-scenes video.

It can be just an image and a text post.

You can run engagement as for those types of posts.


Now, they're not as cheap as what I was talking about before.

I said some of the video view engagement ads are dirt cheap.

Dirt cheap.

I'm running a couple of other engagement ads for text and image-based posts.

Actually, one is just text and one's text and image.

They're each getting engagement costs at around 60 cents apiece, so again, my goal is not to drive traffic to a website.


In your case, when you're doing a blog, when you have a blog that you want to build up traffic for relatively quickly, you probably want to think about content that is very, very shareable and that people would want to tag their friends in so that you can get the most bang for your buck.If you're going to run something as an ad and then, hopefully again, retarget and re-engage people that engage with that viral post or viral to the extent that you can imagine going viral with whatever your topic content is, retarget them and then do a traffic ad to get them off of Facebook onto your website onto like, "Hey, here's my most popular posts about this thing.You might enjoy it."

Right out of the gate, though, if you're not doing these warm-up engagement posts on a regular basis, it's going to be a lot harder for Facebook to know where to find the people.

I'm really glossing over, making this sound very easy, but Facebook's algorithms know how to find people that are the most likely to meet the objective.


If you're running a traffic ad and you've never run a lot of engagement ads for your content, they're guessing a lot about who might be interested in this blog post that you wrote and you're trying to drive traffic off of Facebook.

If you've been running a lot of engagement posts, whether it's video or just image content or what have you, if you are retargeting those people with a traffic ad, the traffic costs is way cheaper than it would be if you just started with a traffic ad and you're like, "Hey, I want people to come to my blog."


Think about it that way.

Do some do engagement posts, whether they're video or text or images are going to be the way to like build up your audience on Facebook, hopefully gets you lots of page likes because that makes everybody feel good, and then realize that even if you don't have them on an email list yet, you still have the ability to continue to nurture them on Facebook and then eventually ask for the thing that you want.

Sometimes, the thing that you want is for them to pay you money.

Other times the thing that you want is just for them to come to your website and subscribe there.


 Let me know what questions you guys have about that because I know there's a lot of different scenarios that you'd probably be trying to figure out how that's how this applies to you, but it's literally applicable to every single person.

That is why I'm so excited to share this little tip with you, because you don't have to sit down and face months and months of creating all this content and then still feeling like you're potentially putting it out there to crickets.


Let me share one other quick tip about this and then I'll wrap up for the day.

If you do know something about Facebook Ads, then you know that Facebook has the ability to target people based on certain characteristics.

For example, if you have a consulting offer or let's say you're a life coach and you work with young moms, you can target young moms on Facebook, that's an actual targeting demographic factor, or you can target people that like Bed Bath & Beyond.

I mean, I don't know where I'm pulling that out of, but we went back to the home decor thing.


You can target people based on interests, based on some types of demographics, like parents of kids who are teenagers, that's another one, for example, or behaviors, such as they like a lot of pages that are related to interior design or whatever.

It's not like a specific page, it's more of like a set of behaviors on Facebook that indicate that they're really into the thing that you offer.


Once you have that information, it is tempting to combine a bunch of things together cause you're thinking, "Okay, I know exactly who my perfect person is.

I'm going to be life coaching for women who are age 40 to 50.

They're a corporate mom.

They have kids who are this age.

And they like Kate Spade."


I mean, it's tempting to pile all of those on each other because you theoretically have the ability to do that, but what I have learned from people way smarter than me about this is that Facebook's algorithms have actually gotten so good that you don't want to do that.

The reason why is because it costs you more money.

The more you limit who your ad or your post or your video, like I said, it doesn't have to feel like an ad, the more you limit who is being shown to, the more, yes, yes, you might theoretically find better leads, but you're setting these constraints and Facebook's algorithms are so good that they actually don't need that much constraint.


What I'm saying is -- that let's say you are running an offer or you're wanting to reach people that are just in that.

Let's say I did just describe your ideal client and it's the corporate mom and she's got this, she's got that, blah, blah, blah, you might just want to select "working women."

That means that they have a job, they're female, and that's it.

Your content should say something like, "Watch this if you... Watch this if you're struggling with blah, blah, blah."

Your content should call out who it's for because then you'll know that the only people who ever even start watching the video are not just working women, they're moms who are overwhelmed, they're struggling with life balance and you can just fill in the blanks.


Your topic should be the thing that makes your content stand out, but you don't need to limit it on Facebook.

Just do a super broad, like one or two demographics or factors, interests, and then set it free.

Let Facebook do what it wants to do with it because they will pretty much find the people.

Once the ad starts learning who's watching this, remember the only people who watch it will be people who are interested in your little teaser, they'll say, "Oh, that's me."

Facebook will start to learn who's watching it.

Facebook will find other people like those people.

That's essentially what they do is that every ad has a learning phase.

They find out.



They, it's the computer, it's not a person.

They figure out who, who is, who is actually taking the action because that's how they make their money.

They make their money when someone takes the action that you wanted: engagement, traffic, sales, conversion.

As soon as they learn, "Hey, what are the common factors of the people who are taking those actions?" they will duplicate it and make sure it gets seen by other people just like them.

You don't have to think too hard on your end about, "I only want this shown to this one certain type of person," because I know everybody's thinking, "I really have an ideal type of client. I just don't want it out there to everybody," but just trust me on this.

Just trust me on this.

It's true and it works.

You will find people who really resonate with you and who like your content because remember, if they don't dig it right at the beginning, they're not going to watch very long and you can retarget people who've watched at least a minute of a 10-minute video, not just like the first three seconds or five seconds or whatever.

That was the quickest video ever on a huge, huge, huge topic, but if this is something that is important to you.

I mean, when I say "it," if building an audience for your thing quickly is important to you, this is one of the top three things that I think just you got to understand from the beginning is you got to choose, "How am I going to pay? How am I going to pay for my audience?"... Because you are going to pay for your audience.You're going to pay with either time, we've talked about those strategies in other videos, or you're going to pay with money and confidence.

It takes a lot of confidence to put yourself out there and be paying money for people that don't know you to start to learn about who you are and what you offer, but you're going to thank me later because when you're selling your service, selling your ebook, you have an audience of people who are willing to buy from you, you're going to be so glad that you did it.

Okay, guys and gals, hope you enjoyed this.

Hope you are all having a great week, and if you do have an upcoming - I have a whole list of things I want to talk about.

If you do have a major request and want me to prioritize it, I will make that happen for you as long as you message me here or comment on the video and just generally shower me with compliments, that works very well. All right, take care.

Talk to you guys soon. Bye!