How Andy Skraga Turns 10K Facebook Followers Into Monetized Pages

[MUSIC] >> Are you ready to jumpstart your next big idea? Then welcome to the Niche Pursuits podcast. It's all about helping you find your niche, getting the motivation and strategies you need, and growing your ideas into something real. [MUSIC] >> We're talking Facebook today, but I think we'll go a little broader in terms of what impacting that as well. >> This stuff is so much more simple than SEO. The days of copying and pasting on Facebook are over, as from this month. >> What type of revenue people look at when it comes to moving into a Facebook environment, earning a bunch of pages? >> I raised 750,000 organically, but that's across all. If you're just starting out, you'll maybe make $10, $20. They've actually scaled up. Tent was there to make $20, $13,000 a month. >> I've talked a lot to those that have kind of given up on trying to get their page into the monetization program because they don't understand it. >> High quality, organic, original content. That's what Facebook wants. That's what it's going to reward people for. >> What type of approach are you taking to buying those followers first? >> We've found out some techniques that you can actually buy followers, quality followers in the US for around about a cent. >> Is there a conflict of interest in terms of publishing the same type of stuff? >> There's no such thing as oversaturation. You can have 10,000 camping pages and you'll do absolutely fine. >> What is upsetting the Facebook? >> The thing that Facebook really hates. >> All right. Welcome back to the Nitch Proceeds podcast. My name is Jared Bomman. Today we have a returning guest, Andy Scrago with hikeyouralikes.com. Andy, welcome back. >> Hey, it's good to be back, Jared. Let's see you again. >> Good to see you as well. Your episode, I should have pulled it up probably two years ago, two and a half years ago maybe. >> Yeah, about two years ago. >> Yeah, two years ago, summertime or summertime, a little bit different seasons right now. It was really well received. One of the most popular ones of the year. We got a lot of people commenting, a lot of questions on it. And a lot has changed in the landscape. >> Yeah. I mean, it's been crazy. >> Each of these years, the last couple of years has been crazy. And now we've got to try to catch up on a couple of them. But we're talking Facebook today. But I think we'll go a little broader in terms of what's impacting that as well. Before we get into today's topic and all that, catch us up on who you are, especially for people who might not have heard the first episode. We will link to it, but just give us a little backstory on yourself. >> Yeah, so I've been involved in web development and SEO for about well over 20 years. But I got into Facebook about 12 years ago. And I got pretty obsessed with it. It was such a quick way to kind of make money online at the time. So back then, it was basically merch and dice and links. This is what we were making money from. So everything from linking to a monetized website to, I used to sell t-shirts on there, affiliate links, that kind of thing. And over 12 years, obviously, it's evolved massively to the point where we're at an hour. It's changed a lot. I mean, I'll kind of summarize last time for us just to give us a little context. We talked about, and you really broke down some of the strategies, most of the strategies you were using to drive millions of visitors, pure Facebook organic traffic. We got into why SEO style posts weren't working there. They don't work there. This was right after each CU. So a lot of people looking, what do I do with my HCU, my SEO posts that are now longer getting organic traffic perhaps. So we talked about, you know, how to adapt that content, how to get your first 10,000 followers, linking, comment, these types of things. So I'd say today we're picking up what we left off, but there's a lot of new stuff. We've got the new content monetization program. We've got AI content production and really where is that at in terms of Facebook. We'll get into your numbers, but maybe talk from your vantage point about where we're picking up from that last interview two and a half years ago. What is change and what do we need to talk about today from a high level? Yeah, so two years ago people were very focused on getting their traffic from Facebook rather than Google because obviously the host of you here and there was all these updates to Google. So most people are actually interested in getting traffic from Facebook, but they just then they introduced the performance bonus. So it was just starting to come around about 2024 summer, 2024. I started seeing people earning six grand a month just from that, not for the links. So they were basically doubling up the traffic. They were doubling up their revenue from traffic to bonuses. So what happened then is that this content monetization came about from performance bonus. They basically rebranded it and just started making this thing more and more of a thing. I mean, it's still in beta at the moment, but it's about to go into production. I'm sure this year, maybe early next year. And people are really starting to wake up and notice because this is making Facebook more like YouTube, but you become a content creator and you get rewarded for putting some original content on there. So that's pretty being my focus in last year. It's really focused on content monetization, more so than links. Tell us where you're at in terms of Facebook and just to give people context in terms of what you're involved in. Share it however you want, whether it's in terms of dollars, whether it's in terms of number of Facebook pages, groups, you're running whatever it is. Give us some context so we can go into this understanding where you're coming out from. I like to keep things really simple. I just run pages of that really run groups. I buy around 25 pages across different niches. So I was always involved in quizzes for kind of the past six, seven years and viral sites. So like general viral pages, that kind of thing. So the quizzes are basically the thing that I've been doing the most, but they've actually been doing really well. So under content monetization, I'll be making three times revenue on the post and I have been for the links. So I start thinking maybe I should branch out into other niches, which is what I'm doing now. So there's some really good niches you can do for content monetization that may not necessarily be so good for links. So stuff like nostalgia, kind of fishing hobbies, that kind of thing that work really well. You get so much engagement, you can actually make some some really good money on Facebook itself. And you don't have to worry about building a website or anything like that. So I think we'll get into keeping people on Facebook versus pushing people off of Facebook and the different approaches there. From a high level, like what type of what type of revenue are you talking about from like 25 pages? Because now that's taking you a long time to build up. So to be fair, like if if you're just listening to this and you've got one page, that's going to be very different. But what what type of revenue can people look at when it comes to moving into a Facebook environment, running a bunch of pages? Well, it's been a bit of a moving target because they can't change stuff all the time, especially because it's in beta. But what we're seeing is for around a million views, people are earning about $100, which doesn't, it sounds like a lot of million views on Facebook. I've got a million views on one real the other week over 24 hours. So so the potential there is to get millions of views there across multiple pages. So if you're just starting out, you, you're maybe make $10, $20, they're actually scale up. The potential's there to make 20, 30,000 a month. I mean, there's some people making six figures a year at the moment. There's maybe more. Some of them are in my group, but one person got $765 for one post. So the potential is there to earn, to earn really good money. They don't have to build a website. So for a lot of people, that was the kind of barrier to doing Facebook traffic, but now that's gone. You can just earn traffic directly from content on Facebook. Hey, everyone. Jared here, just a quick word before we get back into the interview. So we talk a lot on this show about how AI is reshaping search. And the reality is, if tools like chat, GPT, perplexity, or Google's AI don't recognize your brand, you're going to be increasingly invisible going forward. As you might know, I run a digital marketing agency called 201 Creative. And my team and I just built something brand new, the GEO snapshot audit. It shows how AI is seen your business across five essential categories. And what's missing so you can start showing up in AI driven results. For a limited time, I'm offering niche pursuits listeners a free GEO snapshot. Complete with your visibility score and next steps on how to improve it. So grab yours now at 201 creative dot com slash GEO snapshot. Again, that's 201 creative dot com slash GEO snapshot spots are limited. So don't wait to grab yours now. All right, back to the podcast. Is there a bit of a standard you got 25 are they've incredibly variable in terms of what they earn? Or is there some sort of norm of sorts where they land after a period of time? The theory is it's not the improvement that if you're in a niche like auto or finance where there is a potential to make money, then you get paid more. It's not proven. I've actually seen like fishing pages that do really well. So I don't think it's so much like SEO where he have to be in like very high paying niches. I think it's more complex than that. But yeah, I'm generally seeing higher quality pages with no kind of restrictions on the page. Tends to earn most that's what I'm seeing. So high quality, organic, original content. That's what face once that's what it's going to reward people for. If you can't just copy content from a different page and put it on anymore. It's not going to work. They've got an algorithm change it rewards the originality very strongly. And even today, I've seen a post on Twitter. Somebody's figured out that the originality scoring. It's very strong. So the days are copy and pasting on Facebook over as for this month. And where are you at in terms of earnings or in terms of revenue? I know there's a lot of, you know, those costs are going to be in terms of the content monetization program 25 sites. Where does that land for you? Almost every page has been invited, even ones with about 12,000 followers. And on those, my best pages, they earn about maybe $10 for 100k views. So it's pretty good. I mean, it's thousands of marks and it's growing. I'm actively building more pages and niches are good for content monetization, which is the best thing to do. You know, to try and figure out what pages are the easiest to create a digital content for and pay pretty good. And then just double down because you need to scale horizontally. You need about five to 10 pages to actually earn thousands of mark. But it's quite straightforward. As I said on my previous podcast, because this stuff is so much more simple than SEO. There's so much less to worry about. It's really, it's very good fun because you're basically just the content creator. And you can focus on creating quality, original content. And it's not so technical, not anymore. Okay, so let's get into the nitty gritty of it. And maybe the best place to start is the, you know, the content monetization program. It's undergone a lot of changes. A lot of people will be familiar with the idea of trying to get a Facebook page to be monetized by them. And again, the idea there is then that Facebook is paying you based on the amount of traffic that you're generating. The amount of clicks that your posts are getting the amount of engagement they're getting. That's gone through a lot of changes. A lot of people I will say, I'm just going to say this from the outside. I've talked a lot of people that have kind of given up on trying to get their page into the monetization program because they don't understand it. They don't understand what triggers happen. So maybe yes, what's changed? Yes, where are we at now? But also to talk to that person who's maybe a bit frustrated in terms of not understanding what it looks like to get their page accepted. Yeah, so basically you need to have a page that's that's healthy to start with. So if you've got history of violations on Facebook, you're probably not going to get accepted. You need to throw the page in the way that you have wrote for traffic. So you basically need to buy followers up to 10, 12,000, which is actually not very expensive these days. We found out some techniques. You can actually buy followers quality followers in the US for around about a cent. So that's really good. I mean, you can grow the pages quite cheaply and quite quickly. So the main thing is that you need to be posting consistently engaging content. That seems to be the biggest problem. So people who are actually finding old pages and not getting accepted into content monetization. The best thing to do is start posting original content. That seems to be the thing that's getting the invite. So I think the reason I got invites on all of my pages was because I was consistently posting original content. So that does something to do. Just be active on Facebook and make sure we have enough followers. Those seem to be the two biggest things that we're seeing at the moment. And it can be frustrating. You do have to wait. It is an invite program. But I've seen that people that actually have enough followers and do post. I'll get those invites eventually. Is it a lot of people will experience a page that gets a viral, you know, opposed to go viral. And it will really pad the stats in terms of views and potentially, you know, the engagement metrics. Is it more a case of building that consistent engagement on a proposed basis that helps you get accepted? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to have a certain amount of engagement. If you've got zero engagement every post, you're not going to get invited. But I mean, the thing is with Facebook, it's a case of you always chasing as viral posts. So what I'm looking for is one or two viral posts a day because that makes 95% of the income. It makes 95% of the new followers to the page. But I mean, just to get invited, you're going to have to make sure you're getting a decent amount of engagement on every post. And even if that means dropping back to maybe, I mean, six to 12 posts a day is plenty to get invited. So if you don't have to put 24 posts a day on not, not if you just want to get invited songs to the program. It's also quite easy to get kicked off of it. So you want to make sure that you, you're very white hat because when you get kicked off, it's the biggest suck. So you want to ensure that you're very white hat and you need to avoid anything that's going to be upsetting to Facebook. And they also don't like certain things like like videos made from images that really move that kind of thing. That's also going to get you demonetized. So it's good to know that the rules before you get into this. So you don't accidentally get kicked off a bit because you're not getting invited back on if you are especially been waiting a couple of months, you know. What is, I know there's no typical, but just to give people a framework, I'm starting today, or I've been running a page, but doing it all wrong, not breaking rules, but not doing the proper engagement tactics. Like, if I'm posting six to 12 a day, assuming I'm doing a decent job at creating original content, are we talking months or are we, has that changed since the program has changed. It's changing constantly, but they were way more rapid now in the last couple of months than it had been for years. So so many people were in my mastermind are saying, I've finally been invited. And then, you know, it's really happening now for people. And I've seen that you don't need a huge amount of post or huge amount of followers anymore that used to have to have. So I think for people who are joining now, they're going to be maybe two to three weeks as long as they're posting content. You know, as long as the page is more than kind of 12k followers, that's what I've seen. So I mean, some of my pages like 14k and that they will all be invited soon. So to get started, we need to buy our way to 10,000. The reason is because it's quicker because it's easier. It's way quicker. Do I need to do any targeting when I do this, you know, because here's a question I hear from time and I think it's a valid question. It's a question I've had. If I'm doing a Facebook page all about hiking, I'll put that out there because I'm going to go for a hike this afternoon. And I'm doing one all about hiking. Do I need to target people who are interested in hiking. So once I hit that 10, 12,000, they are going to be engaging with my content. Or am I getting a page to 10 to 12,000 because that's what Facebook needs to even think about accepting me. And then their algorithm will do the work of finding other people to engage with it. Yeah, you don't want to go too broad. You don't want to go too narrow. So you want to kind of basically target people who are into hiking for sure, but don't get too niche about it. So we want to we want to get our followers from tier one countries as well. So so US is going to pay more content monetization and say South America. Like you can sell someone like that. So you're still looking for good quality followers that you're buying directly from Facebook. You're not buying them for some purpose party kind of bot traffic or stuff like that. So it's more difficult when you talk about stuff like nostalgia or viral stuff because then it's really hard to target people. Yeah, like quizzes. I mean, that would be hard to target people. Yeah, it's really hard to target. So you tend to target age ages in certain countries. That's really all you can do. But it's much easier if you have like a hiking page, a camping page, a fishing page. I've seen a huge amount of success in those outdoor niches. Even for like shops and outdoor shops have been posting stuff and then really banking from content monetization is a kind of side side hustle. So it's you know, but you do have to kind of keep those followers as good quality as you can. So but once you bought the first 10,000 you don't need to spend any more money or you're going to grow organically from there. And one post can bring you, you know, thousands of new followers overnight. So it happens quite quickly once you've got the hang of posting the kind of content resonates. So obviously, but if you buy 10,000 people into hiking, make sure you post hiking content. Don't go posting random quizzes and stuff from entertainment. It's not going to work out. And once they're hooked on the kind of content you put on, they're very hard to kind of change direction. So what happens is your content ends up looking very similar, and that's fine. Most pages content is similar if it's successful. I don't want to get too deep into it because I want to focus on some of the other things we have, but general tips at the advertising side of things. I say ad, but buying followers, doing it for a price that's really reasonable. What type of content, what type of ad, what type of what type of approach are you taking to buying those followers for? Because it is about economics, right? You don't want to spend a ton of money out of the gate on that. No, we need to target not too broad, not too narrow. So you're talking maybe 50 to 100 million potential people, when you run the ads, you'll see a gauge at how many people you're targeting. So I mean, at the moment, Facebook's pretty good at broad targeting. So even if you go very broad with hiking, you're still probably going to do okay. The biggest leave you've got is a creative because the advert image, and I would just use, just use an image that I worry about video. That's the thing that's going to pre-qualify the audience. So I'll see you want to use a hiking person. The AI is great for this. So just use a Sora or mid-journey image. The thing we found that drives the cost down is actually a text at the top saying, "Do you love hiking?" And then at the bottom you say, "Press the thumb." And you have a little finger pointing down towards the follow button. As it appears on the mobile phone, as most people on Facebook are on mobile. And that simple trick really is actually the thing that's driving sub two cents a click. So you can't kind of go deeper into it, but the best thing to do is keep it simple, you know, that buying the page follows should be an extremely simple process. And it's something that you kind of want to not overthink. I mean, we could do an entire, I feel like we could do an entire episode just on that. And I would actually like to do that. But let's stick to the agenda for today. I don't want to bury you with so many questions about that. I want to talk about something you've already said three or four times. It's in our agenda and it's this idea of original content, almost segueing into, "Hey, we've got our 10,000 followers. Let's move on from that." So that's an open ended term, original content, good high quality content, right? High quality, like in the past, we've been taught to emulate successful pages, right? Hey, you're in the hiking niche. Go look at what other hiking content is working well. Post a lot of that same stuff, like has much changed in that world. What is high quality right now? Well, the thing about Facebook is it's one of the few platforms is not actually not reducing AI. So we have a golden opportunity here. We can use AI. And that's really two things have come together over the past year or so is that the content monetization has come along and it pays well. And we have AI. So it's really, I mean, I, I use a $20 a month saw a subscription, which I can make unlimited content. So the way so it's still to go from what works. So if you're in the camping niche, I find a successful camping page like Camperville, which has been really blowing up AI content. And what I do is basically feet, I will download those images from the page, but I will not take those images and put them onto my pages. I mean, that's basically stealing content and now you can't do that on Facebook anyway. What I do is I upload them to chat to you, I ask it to create a sore prompt for an image or a real. And then I'll actually create the image from that. So you've got the same context, the same message, possibly I might change the message. And then I'm creating my own content. That's original and that's kind of my tactic at the moment. And you can do that. Like I sat down last Sunday, I made about 300, which is enough for a month or so at least of original content. By original, you can repost your own stuff. But you know, you can repost your own stuff over and over again. That will still be original. It's when you take it from a pages. It's not original. What does a what when it comes to this this approach, is that what's driving most of your success right now is an AI driven approach of undue and what's working well. Yeah, AI has changed everything. Yeah. For example, I'm with with Toby posts has text on each background extremely successful. They're just text posts, but you get paid for them. I mean, you get paid on my own pages that the most profitable ones are images that post type. Then it's reals, then it's Toby's, but they're just texts. So they're so easy to do. So what I do is if I find the page is successful with these text posts are basically copy of maybe 25. Feed those into chat, you pay and ask it to create 25 more, but different. And then if you say, OK, I want these for the hiking niche. Create me 50 and hiking it. You've got your content. This is easy as that. And then you can post that. Once you're what I recommend doing, you got a brand new hiking page, you've got 10,000 followers, just post Toby posts for the first month, free chat to you. Just make sure you don't use any guesswork. Then use your intuition. You don't find this successful outdoor page. Basically copy what they're doing feed that through the AI system to create brand new content that's similar but different. That is the best approach right now and try and schedule this every hour, even on the page with 10k because 10 monetization is kind of a numbers game as well. So with links you can get away with when I'll drive links to say quiz sites. I could get away with about six links a day to drive quite a lot of traffic. With content monetization, you want to really ramp up your posting frequency up to 48 times a day, as long as it's engaging content. So obviously you'll make more money. So I know I pass content monetization is the golden opportunity at the moment. And is that the focus for most people right now is hey, I don't want to say forget the links, but the focus right the primary driver is let's keep people on the platform, let's go for content monetization. And that means posting tons of engaging content. Don't worry about the links. Keep people there and find what works and do it over and over and over again. So it's an extent, but I found that if you add a link into an image in the first comment actually increases reach you can actually earn more by adding links into the first comment. And some people have been saying that goes against everything we've known so far to adding a link into the status area above an image is actually increasing content monetization. So at the moment, it's a real playground of experiments to try and figure out what works obviously they Facebook there, they're changing the goal posts all the time. But kind of less than they were before, they're kind of almost at production stage where they're going to stop tweaking everything and we can kind of get more science on this and less guesswork. But what we've seen is that you can use a mix of links and content monetization. It doesn't hurt the content monetization send traffic as well. You're increasing your revenue. Let's get it a little bit into your workflow. If you could talk about a successful workflow, maybe almost finding. Continuing along the timeline, we've been discussing where we've gotten our page to 10,000 likes. We've moved on from that. We've started to create content. We figured out how to do that by finding what's working really well using AI to help us in terms of not guessing but focusing on what's working and then trying to emulate that in our page. What's a workflow look like for you kind of tinted at it, you're like, hey, I just did this and that's going to be a month worth of content right there. What's a workflow look like for you with AI with the new content monetization program going forward. So obviously we want to automate as much as we can. So what I'll do is create, I'll think of everything is in like buckets, like content buckets. So I've got a bucket of reels and I've got a bucket of Toby poster in a spreadsheet and I've got a bucket of images. So you have to system my stuff because you're going to be posting thousands of pieces of content. So if you don't have a system, it's not going to work for you when you start scaling that is. So basically I'll sit down and I'll always bulk generate kind of 50 to even 500 pieces of content at a time. So I don't use any guesswork. So whatever niche I'm in, I'm going to go to look at some other pages and I use a tool called apathy, which is just a base. Facebook will not let you access any metrics on post via the API, the Facebook API. I used to do that a lot, but that will change a few years ago. So I use a tool called Facebook post scraper on apathy and it basically, like when you're looking for a timeline on Facebook sale, that's gone viral, that's gone viral. All this does is just put it into a spreadsheet for you, you know, you can do like a thousand posts. Then I'm going to put it into a Google sheet and I'm going to basically see which ones the most viral by sorting, sorting the sheet by the most viral post. Then I'll say at the top 25 and if there are images, I'm going to use those. So like Toby posts and that kind of thing, I don't really worry about links and reels as well. So I'm going to create, try and create about 250 images in that niche. And that's going to be my content for next maybe three to six months on that page. So the basic workflow is once those are in spreadsheet, I'm going to use post planner bulk upload CSV file and that's going to upload three days to a week's worth of content. So I can then walk away from that and go on and do the next thing. So I'll grow a page to about 40, 50,000 followers, organically from 10,000, then I'm going to scale horizontally. What that means is if you're saying the camping edge, I might do a wild camping page. So it's a stubborn edge of the niche. So if I've got a fishing page, I might do a river fishing page, but it's close enough. So you want to scale out to about fruit free to five pages in that niche. And the thing is you can use the same content on those pages or you can just add some more like maybe a hundred more reels or a hundred more images that post. And I'm going to basically schedule it to all of them, but mix up. So lastly, you want to do a schedule the same post to five pages at the same time that's going to look spammy. So we just mix up and spreadsheet and that's basically how I grow horizontally across different niches. So you kind of want to get all your pages up to well over 50,000 and you're going to see some really good income. Okay, so you talked about having pages, multiple pages in one niche, one broad niche. Now you talked also about originality. Is there a conflict of interest in terms of publishing the same type of stuff into different pages of yours, or does Facebook somehow determine that these are all part of the same broadcaster. No, it doesn't work like that. I mean, it's kind of original, but similar looking. So you'll notice that the kind of content you you'll end up posting that people respond to will look very similar. It might be kind of with fishing. It might be a certain kind of people being seeing lots of success with with comedy in so like funny camping posts and stuff. If I need dog posts, dog niches are really good. Of, by the way, there's no such thing as over saturation. There's three over three billion people and they're all hungry for good content. So it's not like SEO where you're trying to get to know one. You're just trying to basically pay out that content. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it needs to be different enough that another post, but it's only like a 10 to 20% difference I've seen. I've seen people report that they tweaked the font on on a meme. And that's probably going to be enough. I mean, we don't know for sure. I think it's about 20% original until we start getting more signals from Facebook about what originality means. They'll probably change the thresholds anyway, but I just try and make stuff. You can clearly see it's different, but the message, the captions that people are using at the moment, old captions that we've been posting for the last decade. So the same, in fact, there's, there's some pages. I've been studying recently and what they do is they, they create this kind of AI kind of like a gorilla, like a cuddly gorilla in a real or an image. And they put the most dusty old caption on top and they're doing crazy stuff. If you think about a page with 100,000 followers, well, they get 100,000 reactions on these posts. So that's 100% engagement ratio. So you can imagine the amount they're making. I mean, they're getting millions, tens of millions of views on every single post, but they're just taking an old caption and they're giving it a modern, a modern layout and a modern, you know, theme using AI. And that's a great thing to do. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You're just just presenting an effective or a caption in the new format, basically. And again, if you're listening and you're watching me ask questions, but not ask other questions, a lot of that is strategic because we've had Andy on a couple years ago, and he got super into the weeds. So again, I just want to encourage you, go back and listen to that. I'm trying to ask questions about what's changed, what's different, utilizing AI in a different way, but I'm also leaving out some questions because we covered it in depth two years ago. So just a reminder, go back and listen to that too, if you're wondering about some of the gaps there. And a gap, something that's changed a lot is image and video creation. Years ago, and forgive me, I might get it exactly wrong, but there was canva involved, there was stock images involved, there was your own photography involved, there was adding your overlays on top of things, it was a huge portion of the workflow. And you've alluded to really using AI for that talk through how we're actually getting images nowadays with the use of AI and even videos to some degree. Canvas taken a bit of a back seat, so it's only been in the last six months we've been able to render reliable text over image and video, and that's because of the talk, I used to use mid-journey, but it can never do text. Right. Now with Sora, which people think is a video, actually has a very powerful image generator. It's the same image generator, if you go into chat, you appear and you put and generate an image, it's the same thing as that, but it's in its own kind of desktop thing. So basically what we do is we can take an image and mean with text, and we can feed that into Sora and it will produce perfect text, which we've only been able to do for the last six months or so. So that's really been a massive game changer, because one of the biggest pains I've had is adding text over layers, and it's crazy. You can do it, but you need tons of code or expensive tools and stuff like that. Or you have to do it, you have to hire a VA, you can specify the different fonts or the meme styles and that kind of thing. So for the most part, Sora is actually the thing that's allowing me to produce content with the text on top, and not having to go into canvandert. It's the same with reals and stuff, so the video is less reliable, so people are still having to use Canva to put text over real, or Camtaze, or something like that, some video or this thing, but I'm sure that within the next six months you'll be able to do a pretty perfect video with text on top as well. So it's all changing so fast, but it's the easiest thing at the moment to actually create those kind of images and reals, but extremely effective on Facebook. And I think that's important to keep in mind, like it's the concepts that people need to learn. We've hit a point where AI can successfully do text over image where they can successfully kind of blend the whole thing that hasn't been the case for a while, whether it's Sora, at the time of you listening to this, whether it's something that's changed or different. Maybe mid-journey has caught up, who knows, but I think it's kind of the concepts of what can and can't be used right now, and a couple years ago that was not the case, you know. Let me ask you a bit about how the monetization side of things is working nowadays. We haven't really touched on monetization. It's been kind of this, you're going to earn money if you do these things right now. How does that look for a page that's growing and just trying to walk people through what to expect within, you know, within the range of understanding that it's very quite variable. Yeah, I mean, the worst part is when for the invite and you don't know if you've got some sort of shadow ban. So basically Facebook never forgets and I've just been hit on one of my pages for for reals because I did something I wasn't supposed to do about seven years ago. So people forget, you know, that's why it makes it difficult to buy Facebook pages because you don't really know what's happened in the past, always best to make them from scratch and then, you know, they're clean and healthy. So assuming a page is healthy, you just have to wait for that monetization. Then it seems you get it. It's actually quite simple that they basically had out the money you've earned on each page and you get a monthly payment to your bank. So that side of stuff has been this kind of, you do have to start with your bank details and stuff, but yeah, it's really straightforward and really, they've been quite reliable at paying as well, so, so far. The bulk of your income, would you say it's from viral content content that goes viral, that's where kind of if you were to look at the 80 20 of it, or is it, you know, is that less of where the income comes or do you not even know, you know, is it just a check at the end of the month and you're like, well, I got this many uses. Yeah, that they're still rolling out that you any were able to see it on mobile until about four months ago and they can actually see how much you've earned on every post, which is very insightful because of that we wouldn't really know what if we did what we're doing is right. So in the new pages experiment experience in in the latest version of when you go, if you switch into a page and you go into your page metrics. If it's up to date, you're going to have a stortable table and you can sort by monetization. So that's a huge deal because then you could look at your top 25 earning person say what did I do right because you want to double down on what words and when he says basically cut anything that doesn't work. So over every kind of couple of weeks or a month, I'll go for all of my posts in the back end and I'll basically say, I'm not posting these again, these 20% can can can be killed. But these 20% I've made the most money from how can I make 20 more of those for each one. So that that's the process I go for and that's how to maximize earnings because you know, that's how everything ends up doing kind of similar because your audience gets very hooked on the certain kind of content you're not going to be doing. You can do some experiments like 20% of your timeline can be an experiment, but for the most part, you're feeding your audience what is they want to see so very very nations on that. How have you found video content to perform, especially now that you're able to look at how it's performing in the monetization side of things. Is it does it drive a lot more engagement does it drive a lot more monetization like or both. But reals are massive fact that they're the second biggest owner on my pages and they get insane reach that the reach is very fast for reals because they exist in our own timeline. So you see the normal timeline on Facebook, whether in a little horizontal timeline or all in around and that brings in like 95 plus percent non followers. You can imagine that your normal ratio is kind of between 10 and 90% followers on post, but with reals it's almost always 90% non followers who haven't seen your page yet. So it's the best thing to actually bring in new followers is posting reals. The only downside to reals at the moment is it's so easy to get slapped for them. You've got any kind of background music. Man, that's just a minefield. The moment they said you can't have reals that don't have enough animation in them. So if you've got like a static background with text on top, okay, you're going to lose your content monetization and your reach is going to go down. And once you've got one post has been kind of slapped and the other post will kind of not be, you know, they won't get a receiver. And also if you have like slide shows that there's quite a few there's like five or six real types, they don't like at the moment. So if they do have to be pretty good, you know, they do have to be like an actual kind of film. But again with with AI with VO free, for example, which is producing the best. Reels at the moment, but it's quite expensive. That's that's what they want that they don't want this kind of old fashioned kind of content. Probably good time. My first thing I wrote down from my note so far is what is upsetting the Facebook and like, what don't they like? What are things that are going to get you flagged and get you in trouble? Unfortunately, the rules have grown massively. There's like four different pages of it with rules you have to learn. But you know, if you want to make money on Facebook, you're going to have to learn these. And they're not all about kind of like gore and violence. They really hate that. I mean, there's people in my mastermind that have been had their accounts shut down for that. And they didn't realize because they weren't watching their content class enough, which is like, "Biboggy sends you one new automate all of your Facebook with NaN and all that stuff." I said, "I could, but I need heavy human oversight. I've got to make sure every post doesn't break the terms of service. And I only need about 500 posts for like two months of content. So I'd rather just have heavy human oversight anyway because there are so many rules I have to bear in mind, you know, even with backgrounds on reals and that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, you do need to know the community guidelines, the terms of service. And also there's a whole set of sub rules for content monetization. And as I said, it's easy to get kicked off. So you need to know this stuff. Well, I mean, there's a many things you can do, but there's like these 12 things you can't. And you need to know that because you know, this sucks. What are the big ones? Like what are the ones that you're constantly struggling with? The ones or maybe in that vein, a second question would be, what are the ones that are a little bit more nuanced that, for example, somebody like me, where to go read them. I wouldn't pick up on some of the nuance of the rules. So maybe a two part question, like, what are the big ones that you're struggling with? And what are the ones that are more nuanced that would be harder to interpret from those rules. Big ones at the moment are basically adult content, goal, violence, that kind of thing. The thing that Facebook really hate is calling out a group of people. If you do any of that kind of stuff, calling out a group of people, you will get kicks off of Facebook so fast you'll be flying. But what they're not worried about now is political content. They've actually wide open the doors by a year ago to political content again. So you can actually post political opinions and stuff and they're not fast. They were fast before. So that's actually opened up a lot. So you don't need to be so afraid to voice your political opinion. It's not actually used to some extremely engaging posts. And a lot, there's a whole kind of subset of a political posting that's happening. There's certainly lots of content monetization. We can't be saying kind of thing at the moment. So the more subtle ones are generally the kind of layouts of your images and stuff. So there's, like, say, there's certain things like if you have a looping background on a real. So say you've made a 10 second video in Sora, because unless you pay a lot of money, you can either short clips. If you loop that for, like, 10 seconds or five seconds, you get your monetization taken away. So obviously that's really subtle, which is why you need to know. I didn't know and it affected some of my pages. So you have to be very white hat. You know, you have to be kind of granny friendly. You see a lot of pages like adult jokes and stuff. I do know that those page owners always complaining about being put in Facebook jail and I'm not being able to post for a couple of weeks. It's not great. So you don't need to do anything apart from white hat and Facebook, because it's so easy to earn money without any sort of chunky tactics or anything like that. Is this part of the reason why you have 25 pages? Is it because even with your best efforts to keep up with what is and isn't allowed. It's always changing. It's complicated. It's nuance. It varies. It's open to interpretation. Is that part of the game is just understanding that if you go all in on one, two or three pages, like the chances that you will be able to keep all the balls up in the air properly throughout the course of the time with that is just maybe a bit too big of a risk. I don't understand, but I mean, if you get a lot of problems with your pages, it reflects on your your whole Facebook account and every page you create will be affected. So do you don't get away with just having kind of pages that are knocked down like skittles, it'll get back to you eventually, but I'm small like I know people 500 pages and they're breaking it in. So you need some serious systems for that. So yeah, it's just more that I just want to be in every single niche because I know so many profitable niches I'd love to be in. I mean, it's just so many options is I'd love to have 100 pages and the experiments you can run where you kind of have multiple pages and then you cross post viral content. It's kind of if you can basically trouble your income, if you've got multiple pages and similar niches, so I'd love to be doing kind of fire will turn of those are there. I should also add that there's a lot of people noticing that if they engage with their comments, they're running a lot more. So there is definitely an argument to to having maybe a small amount of pages, but you're very engaged with so maybe you got five pages, but you answer all the comments. If he was saying it's really helping their monetization, they're getting much more money. Wow, so interesting. It's a good segue. I wanted to ask a question about this is we're kind of starting to come to an end here, but we've focused exclusively on building pages mostly around the content monetization program, but you mentioned that links still helping in many ways add value actually help your page like are you still seeing earnings from other things besides just a content monetization program. If so, you know, we talk a lot this on this podcast about how to create a piece of content and get the maximum value for it. What are ways that people can get maximum value for the content they're creating. Yes, creating primarily for Facebook, but are there other ways you're earning money from that content beyond just a monetization program. Sure. I'm still earning lots of links and I've seen a lot of pages still do merchandise just today. I saw a page every post was a t-shirt. So those days are definitely not over. The holy grail to me is having both. So the perfect page for me is every post is an image post and an image post is viral and it's making money from content monetization and I have a link in the first comment going to one of my websites. So I'm basically doubling the revenue. For me, that's the most interesting thing, but obviously there's a lot of ways you can earn money from Facebook. You know, you can do, you can post Amazon links directly in Facebook. They let you do that. There's so many platforms that don't. So yeah, I mean, it depends what you want, what you're interested in really. If you enjoy creating content, you're in a niche that you enjoy like fishing. I would just, yeah, I mean, you can make a website and then send links to it and it works great still. But I mean, content monetization, the barrier of entry is so low and you can test stuff out. So for me, it's much more interesting at the moment than links. You have, I know you have a bunch of involvement with students of yours. You have a mastermind like talk a little about what you're doing to help others succeed on Facebook. You've been doing that for a while. I know it's tied up to hike your likes and, you know, I've taken part actually in one of your courses from a year or two ago. But where is that at now? Where are you, where are you spending your time when it comes to that? Yeah, so in my mastermind, there's, I mean, there's hundreds of students now. So a lot of my time is actually helping those students out from some of students who just start an out and they just start to grow their pages and there's a lot of kind of 101 questions there. We've also got some people that are incredible. I mean, there's a lot of people who know that I'm making four, five figures a month and they've got a lot of pages and they really know what they're doing. So they're getting into the kind of really advanced tactics as well. So it's, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, I spend probably about an hour a day just talking to students and kind of helping them out to kind of grow, grow their pages and grow monetization. And a lot of them still are very much interested in sending traffic to their website as well. So that's, that's not gone away. And we didn't talk about that, but it's obvious. I think for people listening, like if you're able to send even some of that traffic to your website, your monetize to be an ad network, you have all the other things going for a traditional website that we've always talked about here. Like you said, you're double dipping, you can then triple dip, they'll email less like in many ways. Yes, the percentage of people that are going to go from your Facebook post to your website are small, but like you said, it's not hard to get a million, two million, three million people to engage with a post of yours. So you don't need a high percentage of those. And so there's a lot of different ways to double and triple dip. Yeah, I mean, there's a guy called Jeff Rose, he's recently been all over social media because he's been making 120,000 from contact monetization on a financial Facebook page. And he said I didn't really was interested in Facebook until they pay me hundreds of dollars for this one viral post. And then you got kind of interested in it, and ended up making six figures a year. And that's in the financial niche, which is a traditionally a really hard niche to actually get engagement from and make money from. So he ended up releasing a course and just going really into it. So yeah, I mean, there's a huge opportunity at the moment, and we're very early to it as well. So normally the worst thing about doing an online business is you arrive just as everybody's reading the pitch and they've made all the money. Well, this is actually an opportunity that's just come along. It's still in beta and so few people know about it all worrying about YouTube shorts and stuff. Well, this is an opportunity like YouTube shorts, but hardly anyone is talking about it or doing it or trying to figure out science. So if you get in now, you're actually going to be really early to this. And there's no saturation at all. Andy will include a link in the show notes to what you have going on. I have done personally just a little thing I've done a couple one on one calls the over the years about Facebook and you're incredibly informed and very helpful. So I'll say that not a part of your community, but definitely have enjoyed some of the more advanced takes you've had on some of the stuff that we've done. It's good to have you back for a second time. I know the first thing we received. I'm sure this will be the same way. I need to write stuff for hours. It's really interesting. It is fascinating. It's cool to see that you've evolved with Facebook as it's evolved. It's cool to see the monetization program continuing to evolve. I think a lot of people and we were talking about the news episode. I remember a year or two ago with Spencer doing his page and talking about like we didn't know if it was like you said it was it was beta. We didn't know how long it's going to be around for if it was going to be around for, but it's really neat to see it being here for two to three years and evolving, which is such a good sign for where it could go going forward. It's not going away. No, it's just been born and it's just going to be a couple of years. I think a couple years to be able to figure this out. It's going to be really good. It should be stable for a while at the moment, maybe messed around a bit quite a lot, but I think we're really going to pin down the science of this really soon. Once we do that, we figure out what signals are actually rewarding the post that get in the content monetization. There's going to be some big money made. Facebook had paid up two billion pounds to content craze in the past year. Just people like me, just people like you. So anybody can do it, anybody can throw up a page, a couple of hundred dollars to get the first 10,000 likes, and then you're good to go. You just start posting content. And like I said forward traffic is really good fun. It's the most fun platform. It's way, way quicker than SEO. It's way quicker than YouTube, but probably by a factor of 25. So you can throw a page up and be earning next month. So, so that's the thing I'm massively impatient. I want to be earning money tomorrow and Facebook's the only platform that I should do that moment. Love it. I'm sure that's going to peak a lot of people's interest. Andy, thanks for coming back on. Another great episode. I appreciate you. We'll talk again soon. Cheers. Hey, before we wrap up, quick reminder, if you want to see how AI tools like chat GPT perplexity and Google actually see your brand, check out the new GE O snapshot audit from my agency 201 creative. It shows how visible your business really is across five key categories and what to fix. So you start showing up in these AI driven results. And for a limited time, I'm giving niche pursuits listeners a free GE O snapshot complete with your visibility score and next steps to improve it. So you can grab that at 201 creative calm slash GE O snapshot. Again, that's 201 creative calm slash GE O snapshot claim your spot before they're all gone. All right, have a good one. [Music]