Laura Peters is the owner and author of Mike & Laura Travel, a blog that helps travelers find unique destinations and travel experiences on a budget. She is also the CEO of Scale Your Travel Blog, a coaching program that helps travel bloggers start, grow, and scale their travel blog income. When she isn't writing blog posts about her favorite travel destinations, she is serving her audience through Scale Your Travel Blog and her live/virtual events, Travel Blogging Summit.
The day our Facebook income disappeared
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I wanted to give you a little peek behind the curtain this week because I think there's a really important lesson in here that most creators are ignoring. I'm not sure how much I've really talked about this, but about a year ago, Mike started a Facebook page about a niche we are growing a newsletter in. Using the strategies he learned in The Facebook Traffic Goldmine*, he was invited to join the Facebook Monetization Program within a few months, and really saw his reach take off. This was obviously exciting. The Day Our Facebook Income Disappeared And then one day it just stopped working. Literally overnight. Facebook flagged something on the page (we still don't fully know what), pulled the monetization, and stopped recommending us. We tried in vain to reach out to Facebook support, but their support team...HA! You might as well be yelling into the void π¬ This continued for months. Six months to be exact. It was hard for both of us to make the call to stop managing the page. While we weren't concerned about the $400 we had invested in Meta ads for page likes, it was tough for Mike to put down the project he had put so much time and effort into. And then a couple weeks ago, our content was being recommended again and we were making money. And while we're happy it's back, we're not making the same mistake twice. Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away, and they don't owe you an explanation either way. How We're Protecting Our Facebook Success Now that the page is picking back up, we're being a lot more intentional about it. The first time around, things happened so fast. It went from new page to monetized to penalized before we even had a chance to set things up the right way. So here's what we're focused on now: 1) Getting people onto our email list with ManyChat This is the most important in my opinion. ManyChat is a tool that automatically sends a DM to anyone who comments on your Facebook posts. So when someone engages with our content, they get a friendly message asking if they want to join our free newsletter. They say yes, drop their email, and they're on our list, all without us having to do anything manually. We set it up once and it just runs. If you have a Facebook page with any kind of engagement, this is honestly one of the easiest ways to grow your list right now. 2) Email list --> Welcome sequence This is the best part. Once someone joins, they don't just get a "welcome, thanks for subscribing" email and then silence. They go straight into a welcome sequence. This is a series of emails specifically designed to deliver value and earn income at the same time. That looks like affiliate recommendations for products, mentions of our own products, and natural sponsorship placements. For those of you who are already on a premium ad network like Mediavine or Raptive, you can also use your welcome sequence to send people back to your best blog posts and earn through display ads that way. 3) Turning our best Facebook posts into more content. We also squeeze every drop out of the posts that do well on Facebook. Those posts become:
Not to mention, the comments on these posts are GOLD, too. People are basically telling us exactly what they want to learn more about, what they're struggling with, what they find funny, etc. We pay attention to all of it and let it shape what we create next. 4) Inviting Facebook page followers into our Facebook group This last one takes about two minutes to set up and most people have no idea it exists (thank god for my friend, Sarah Chant, who is a Facebook groups expert or I would be one of them). Facebook actually has a built-in setting that lets you automatically invite anyone who likes your page to join your associated Facebook group. So instead of someone just hitting like and scrolling on, they get an invitation to join your community. Now they're following the page AND they're in the group, which means we have two ways to reach them directly instead of just one. It's an easy win that most people overlook. The Mistake Most Bloggers Are Making Right Now A lot of bloggers and creators are in the same spot we were in. Something is working, they're excited about it, and they're not really thinking about what happens if it stops. And honestly, I don't blame them.. when things are going well, why would you? But we've all heard the stories. Google updates happen, platforms change their rules, monetization programs come and go. Riding the wave is great. You should definitely ride the waves. But you need to make sure you're building something underneath that lasts. I was at a newsletter summit two weeks ago, and my biggest takeaway from the whole thing was this idea of patching the holes where you're leaking opportunities. Hopefully this email helped you spot a few of your own, whether you're growing on Facebook, Google, Pinterest, IG, etc, etc, etc. My Favorite Blogging
What's Working For Me We just covered Mike's Facebook page pretty extensively, but I also wanted to share something that's been working really well on my end lately. A few of my newsletters have been doing well with sponsorships for a while now, but I had been sticking to pretty basic sponsorship opportunities. For most of my newsletters (I'm currently running seven of them) I was only offering two options:
But then I started asking myself why I was stopping there. So I started getting creative. Some of my newsletters have header images.. why not offer a sponsorship placement there? I also have "favorite resources" sections in a few of them, and the links inside those are prime real estate for the right partner. I tested it out for other newsletters, and already landed two sponsorships this way just in the past week. All of it is clearly labeled for transparency with my readers, obviously. But what I realized is that by thinking a little outside the box, I now have a lot more to offer the right brands/companies, and a lot more ways to earn from the same email I was already sending. I hope this email sparked at least one good idea that you can put into practice this week! Talk to you soon, P.S. All of my Scale Your Blog options are currently closed for enrollment. If you want to be the first to know when doors open again, you can join the waitlist here!β |
Laura Peters || Travel Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing
Laura Peters is the owner and author of Mike & Laura Travel, a blog that helps travelers find unique destinations and travel experiences on a budget. She is also the CEO of Scale Your Travel Blog, a coaching program that helps travel bloggers start, grow, and scale their travel blog income. When she isn't writing blog posts about her favorite travel destinations, she is serving her audience through Scale Your Travel Blog and her live/virtual events, Travel Blogging Summit.
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