Hi everyone,
Before I left for South Africa, I mentioned I was going to expand again on Facebook, after I got hacked last year.
So, I already had 2 pages set up, one for my minisite and one for my Africa site, but besides using ads, I couldn’t really get the followers up. Also, to be honest, it still is a lot of work to post regularly if you don’t look for help.
Our Diane here, has been helping me out, in the meantime, but somehow whenever I stopped any adds, the followers just went down and down again, it was frustrating.
In the meantime, however, I have been following a number of Facebook experts on X, Youtube , etc. You’d be surprised how much free information you can get out there! 
For example Publisher in a box: Account Setup Best Practices - publisherinabox.com , I really recommend subscribing to his newsletter, it is a great source of info about Facebook.
While he has an elite thing going on, well yeah, I still can’t effort that large amount of money at once, eventhough i am now monetized with Mediavine - lol :-p
But then, black friday came around, and I took a chance, and had a consult with Andy from ‘Hikeyourlikes’ , not expecting to much from it. Both me and Diane were surprised however, his hour long consult is really good!
He also sells a Facebook course, but I’m not sure if it would be worth the extra, if you already have a (baby) page growing on Facebook.
To summarize the consult, what we now do is diversify my posts on my page https://www.facebook.com/AdventurousAfrica , with daily reels, informational posts (genre: things to know about a giraffe, for example), memes (jokes or things that went viral from others and repurpose that), and in my niche, I can simply post a picture of a bird and I get lots of likes lol.
A few weeks later (how long was it now, not sure), coincedence or not, I got monetized! (did you know you can get monetized on facebook?) .
So, you might wonder if the traffic to my site has gone up to, that was the first intent after all, honestly: not yet, but I should start to ‘see interesting things’, when I have reached 25k followers.
Also, facebook has been doing weird things in this last season of the year, testing things out. As I was banned for a while from placing links in the comments below the posts, aaarggghhh.
If I would have been able to place more links, I would have grown my site by now through Facebook, I’m sure. There is even talk about placing a maximum of 2 links per month for facebook business pages, unless you go ‘Meta verified’ .
2 things here:
- I probably will go Meta verified anyway, after I have reached a certain followers amount, just to protect my facebook account even more. ( I am now using an app as a verification step, it is even better then 2-step verification of your account )
- If getting meta verified is a condition to place unlimited links on your page, well, I think it would be totally worth it , if you are getting that good amount of traffic, ànd it seems that you would get better and quicker support from Meta in case of issues, which is something very, very important to me!
Let’s see, what else did I want to talk about?
So yeah, sometimes a good course or consult is still worth it, because you might get stuck in your own ways and ‘think’ you are doing everything possible to grow on a certain platform, but that’s not always the case. Basicly, your intuition of what YOU think will work well, isn’t always true! And you need to look at statistics.
Now, Andy has also asked me if I know a good course to begin with, but I havent tried them all, so I can’t really say. But there was one that I got from the ‘introvert entrepreneur’, which was really good, if you just get started. https://www.introverted-entrepreneur.com/facebook-for-niche-sites (not affiliated)
Because , if you start from scratch, you really need to invest in adds first to make a page grow, after that, you can stop the ads. Sadly, out of nowhere, I think it would difficult to grow.
Have I earned much yet with facebook monetization? Honestly: no, not yet, but 16k followers is still not a huge amount to earn good money with fb, and I made many mistakes in the beginning, with buying ads from South-Africa ( I thought I had to , because of the niche, that was silly of me).
So start by buying ads for the USA market, it will save you issues from earning good money later on (also to join journey, for example), and don’t do what I have done lol
Long story short: I am convinced now that Facebook can be a really good platform still to grow, it just takes some investment sadly!
And, follow their rules to the letter!
One other hint that I can still give you: make mistakes in your informational posts, sometimes, the engagment will be fantastic, lol! Just don’t overdo it, and be factual and reliable most of the time. Even grammar mistakes can lead to lots of silly comments (that you just must ignore if you don’t want it to drive you crazy lol!)
Don’t fall for spending way to much free time on it either, just do your posts,and move on with the rest of your work, do NOT go down the rabbithole hahahaha!
Good luck!
Lizzy
