How to Make Money Online of a Facebook Fan Page

Facebook has never been a main source of income for me and to be honest, I have only ventured into it a little bit, trying out it’s paid ads and a few other things, but just today I came across a pretty interesting fan page someone made aiming to make money and while I’m sure it works somewhat, it gave me a lot of great ideas I will personally be using.

I have lost track of how many case studies I’ve done thus far (maybe 15?) but this is the first one where I actually look at someone else’s business rather than my own.

How I accidentally discovered this idea about making money of a Facebook Fan page:

For those of you who use Facebook, you may often see “Fan pages” popping up asking you to like them. Well this is what happened to me. The one that popped up for me was ironically about Wealthy Affiliate University.

But something was weird:

I am already registered as liking a Wealthy Affiliate page on my FB profile as you can see:

So was this an impostor site? Well this is where the case study dives into a grey area because after looking over it, I had found several things, some which gave me a lot of good ideas and others which made me question ethics:

• This page had over 500 likes from people. I didn’t actually see any friends of mine as being fans of it.
• All that it’s really doing is sharing posts people make on Wealthy Affiliate. 
• But in addition to that, I also found a YouTube video made by ME that was being shared.

So how is this page making money and how do you do the same thing?

One of the great things about Wealthy Affiliate is that it allows for people within the community to blog about anything, they success, their progress in internet marketing and things of that nature.

With each new blog a member makes (there are 100’s of new blogs made everyday), the original writers of the blog as well as other members can share those anywhere, including social networks like FB.

However the amazing thing here is that each blog carries the ability to create an affiliate link for the post meaning that if I wanted to share a success story from one of our members that blogged about it, I could go to that post he or she made, click on an affiliate button, get my link and then share it. Here is an example:

That screenshot is from a blog I wrote. The affiliate button is there and available and I know some people who have been using this post I made to put it on their sites as a way of trying to get referrals.

Do I mind this? Not at all. At WA, this system was developed with the purposes of promotion in mind so I’m fine with people using this to promote the program.

And that’s basically what this person’s fan page is doing which is why I said it’s effortless in my title. Now I don’t know how much money this person has made from doing this, but with 500 likes, I’m sure there’s been a few referrals going around. 

You see what happens is that when people visit any blog on WA or the main site itself and they aren’t registered, this is what show at the bottom of the site:

And by joining, the person posting the links gets the credit so that’s what this person has essentially done. They have compiled and continue to compile various posts from WA and put it on this fan page.

Is there an ethics problem if this is encouraged by the program?

I have NO problem with someone making a fan page and doing this. I also think that people should experiment with this idea no matter what their niche topic because making these things is totally free and inviting people you like to join in and then promoting it is also easy (but sometimes it’ll cost money).

The ONLY problem in my opinion that I see with this thing is that this person is using the actual name of Wealthy Affiliate and their logo. I don’t know if the intention is to come of as the official site but it can confuse people as it did confuse me.

It is not uncommon in the marketing world to have people make these kinds of things on social networks to try and get sales. It’s basically piggybacking in the affiliate marketing world.

Now if the person made their own uniquely named profile and did this, I would totally be fine about it, but I just feel as though this is banking of the name of WA and if I were doing it, I would just choose a different name.

Would you guys agree?

Now onto how to make money off the fan page and doing it the way I’d prefer:

• Ideally in my case, I’d need to have a niche site first. With the content I would have there, it would be VERY easy to constantly share this on FB. 

• Next I would actually make the fan page, but name it something unique. If I was also promoting WA on this social network, I’d just give it a name that sounds like it means making money. 

• Then what I would do is go around, find other similar pages on FB where the content was similar, let’s say a famous internet marketer’s post and see what they were posting. If I liked what I saw, I’d share it on my page as well.

• I’d also take the time to leave good comments and feedback, maybe even ask questions or share an experience that was similar. For example, if I found a famous internet marketer’s post on having a huge success with a site they made, I could share a story in the comments of something similar that happened to me.

• Now that last point is extremely important because by doing this, I create value in my comments and attract eyes to my name or in this case my fan page. Leaving a link is not something I would do here because it looks cheap and spammy. It’s basically a form of forum posting which is pretty dead in the SEO world, but on social networks, if you do it right, it can work very well, but I would only do it on YOUR site, not someone else’s.

• It’ll take time, but you can accumulate a lot of likes and people subscribing to you which then goes back to my first point about having topics to share on FB from my niche site, giving my subscribers constant value. 

• Only then can I link them to my site and then my affiliate links OR just do what the person in the case study above did and link them directly to posts on WA through a personal affiliate link.

Now I really like this whole method because by combing the power of a high value niche site and sharing that content over a social network, I can get way more likes, shares and comments which will constantly keep boosting both aspects of the business, which is the SEO and social network part.

Having people from FB like my posts and comment on them on the social network or on my site still gives me more credibility as well as more sharing on FB which if they like will also appear for more people. Growing a following through the social network can really to amazing opportunities in the future besides just affiliate marketing promotions.

I could collect an email list or create my own product and then sell it to my already interested subscribers or something like that.

Occasionally, I would share things I found interesting from other blogs and (always) link to them. The only problem there is that it would lead people outside my fan page and most affiliate programs and other sites do not have the same marketing opportunities as WA in that give you affiliate links to bank of each and every member post. 

But this is something that has amazing ways to create a new funnel of business for you. 

One thing I did not mention in regards to getting more likes is that you can technically use FB’s paid ads to funnel people there, but the parameters you set there are more demographically focused so in my opinion, it would be harder to get people there, which is why I believe sticking to finding related pages on FB would be easier to get relevant fans from.