When Five Dollar Posts was first released, the methods it taught for traffic generation worked well and were very cheap to use. Today however, this is far more difficult and so this review has adjusted accordingly.
Quick Report on Five Dollar Posts:
Name: Five Dollar Posts by Ron Douglas.
Price: $37.
Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 stars.
Really a great course on Facebook ads I’d recommend to intermediate level advertisers whose businesses are involved with social networks. The only problem is, Facebook Ads was much less developed and less strict than it is now, so the strategies taught by this program may not work as well today. It’s still a good program though.
Five Dollar Posts in a nutshell:
This is a course that teaches both Facebook advertising and email marketing.
The goal of Five Dollar Posts is to show you how to create a page for your online business and use the advertising network of Facebook to funnel traffic to that page, then to your own landing page, which can either be a CPA offer, a regular affiliate page or an opt-in website.
Be aware that with Five Dollar Posts, you will also have 2 up-sells ($77 and $125), as well as an offer for coaching from Ron available in the members area for $497. Ron is a successful marketer who as far as I know started with Clickbank (I believe it had to do with selling a cookbook) and then moved more into the online marketing realm.
Where did the $5 figure even come from?
It’s just a reference to how cheap the price of traffic maybe if you use Ron’s approach. And he teaches it very well.
How much traffic can you get?
There’s no average number, but you can be paying a few pennies per click if you narrow down your niche audience through the advertising filter available and if you really find that niche that likes your information, you can really hit some great results.
It is true that creating a FB page as well as your own website is pretty simple nowadays, but what Ron’s program really focuses on is maximizing the potential of FB’s ad network by bringing your page the maximum amount of relevant visitors for little cost.
The way I understood this program was that you will choose a niche, make the FB page dedicated to it, write relevant and interesting posts on your website and each time you do, link it to your FB page, then use the ad network to advertise to people interested in that niche on Facebook, driving them to the page, liking the post, hopefully clicking on the link to visit your site and then engaging in the followup offers from there whether it be signing up to your newsletter or just trying some sort of trial offer for a promotion.
What sort of training does this Five Dollar Posts offer?
The first thing you will be advised to take a look at is the “Quick Start Guide” that Ron wrote up to explain his approach to collecting email lists and making sales through FB.
Overview isn’t what I though it would be. In this page you are given a long video with Ron being shown on TV and his bio, then him talking about what can be done with online marketing with the right steps. Followed by this video (underneath) is a button that leads to a checkout page where he sells his coaching services for $497.
Modules: contains 5 parts (5 weeks).
Week 1: Preps you by having you open up a FB account, making a page, exploring competition in your niche areas to use to your favor and installing a code on your website to track conversions.
Week 2: Ron begins this module by giving you an example of how one project he set up led to him making several thousand in a few days. Basically he direct linked a FB page (I think this is what happened, although he did mention sending out an email so it might have been an email marketing project) he made for people interested in cooking with a site that gave away a free trial of recipes and then sold them products related to that. He was making money for the free signups and if any of those signups purchased additional offers, he would also make commissions.
This is where you are given an example of the power of FB advertising when it works combined with CPA offers and email marketing.
Most of module 2 talks about the email followup you will send subscribers. The idea is to give them something for free to hook them in and then slowly lead them into offers that you will make money from. There are also videos in this module on retargeting campaigns which I found fascinating.
Week 3: Gets you into ad creation. I think Ron did a terrific job here with how he explained how he sets up ads as well as goes through different other examples. This is something that is missing in many internet marketing products.
There has to be some sort of hands on explanation in videos and tutorials to help people understand what is happening and most products just don’t do this. They just generalize what you should do and that really creates barriers. This and a few other programs I’ve reviewed, including my top one, Wealthy Affiliate (yes I do think this is better) do a great job of showing you how to do what they teach.
Week 4: All about testing and analyzing the data you receive from your project so you can make better decisions and take smarter actions.
Week 5: In this final module, Ron does a study on one of his ads he launched and breaks down why it didn’t work. I’ve rarely seen any marketer show a mistake that he or she made, but I believe he did it to show what to do if this happens to you and explain why may have caused it. But do note that Ron also points to many of his successful ads as well throughout the training. The fact that he showed one that didn’t work and how to fix it did make him seem more humble and I respect that he did it.
These are all the modules. There is an additional one in the menu called “Week 6 and bonuses” where you get webinars and power point presentations on advertising from different people who show their case studies.
Finally the last 2 menu items, tools and private group were unavailable to me since they were part of the up-sells that I never bought.
Final Rating: Five Dollar Posts
Green Flag
5 out of 10 stars. Very well done program with a great explanation on FB ads. Although that was the majority of the training, there was also a lot of email marketing training available which was also well done.
The only issue is the evolution in FB ads making it more expensive to do this today, so I’d be careful if you choose to follow the strategies in this guide. A book called Traffic Secrets explained this issue in that as giant paid ad companies like Facebook evolve, so do their prices in that they rise, so this stuff becomes more and more expensive progressively.
My final thoughts:
FB advertising is not an area I claim to have much experience in so while I theoretically agree with just about everything Ron explained in his program, I can’t really make a good judgement until I personally try this out.
However, while specifically not having experience with FB ads, I do have experience with general PPC advertising and it is definitely something I endorse trying once you have money to spare.
With the way Ron talked about this specific topic (budget), he does explain the smart way to make sure you don’t overspend. Basically if you lack money to pay for the advertising, but the project you put up is working, it can pay for itself down the line so while you may not have the money currently to pay for the advertising, it can end up working out if the project you put up converts.
Now this is true, but it’s also a risk that in my opinion is not worth taking. Although you don’t have a big budget at first ($5 per post spent), I always tell people to have money they know they’ll be able to pay just in case something goes wrong or the project doesn’t work out. I know from experience that nothing is guaranteed, and it does apply to paid advertising.
Just make sure to have money saved up for this stuff. If you see that what you’ve put into play is working and you’re converting visitors, you can scale that upward and begin to spend more with the anticipation that the conversion rate will continue to remain the same.
For example:
If I have $50 to spend on advertising, I’ll run my project with my paid advertising networks such that I won’t go beyond that limit.
Then I start advertising. If I see that my ad is getting clicks, people are coming to my site and I’m converting those visits into sales consistently, making a huge profit, I’ll raise my budget from the original $50 to whatever makes sense given my profit margin.
Then when I spend more and conversions keep up, I’ll know I can pay for the advertising no matter what. I have had this exact thing happen before and I ended up making record profits (my personal results with a 1 page site doing this).
And if doesn’t convert (which has happened to me too), I’ll know my original $50 limit is all I’m set to lose and no more. Just keep this tip in mind if you decide to get into the paid advertising world, whether through Facebook or any other network. But following Ron’s program is a good way to go if you decide to try the FB route.