Facebook Groups & Organic Traffic Hacks for Facebook – with Alex S Elliot

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As course creators, we have to build ourselves a following to be able to make any kind of influence or impact.

If we want to sell out online courses, we need some people to sell them to.

If we want to make a difference in the world, we need people to go and help. 

On this episode of the Course Creators Podcast, I am speaking with Alex S. Elliot.

She is an expert in helping you grow in organic Facebook leads.

Today we’re going to focus on a couple of tips, tricks, and hacks that she has for you so that you can grow your Facebook following without spending money on ads.

So get ready, get a pen, get a paper, because we are about to help you explode on Facebook.

Watch the Video:

About Alex

Alex S. Elliot is a Facebook Groups Monetization Expert, the creator of the “One Group Away” Challenge and co-creator of the brand new “Social Funnels” software that transforms FB Groups into Sales Funnels. 

She has been featured on Virtual Summits with Russell Brunson, John Lee Dumas, Mike Filsaime, Jim Edwards, Perry Marshall, Elena Cardone, Alex Charfen, Kathryn Jones, Blake Nubar, Kolton Krottinger, Kim Dang, and Doug Boughton.

Alex has generated over half a million dollars with no paid advertising in the past year and enjoys teaching entrepreneurs how to leverage the power of Organic Marketing, FB Groups, and Automation to authentically connect with their audience and build a tribe of super fans who invest with them over and over.

Resources

• Watch the screen demo on YouTube
• Alex’s website
• Alex’s Facebook page
• Alex’s Facebook group
• One Group Away Challenge

Subscribe To My Podcast

Transcript

What we cover in this episode:

• Why coaches and experts should start a Facebook Group immediately.
• The easiest way to make money with FB Organic Traffic
• How to crush the Organic Traffic Game
• Why should coaches and experts start a Facebook Group?
• What’s the easiest way to make money with FB Organic Traffic?
• How do you crush the Organic Traffic Game?

Why you need to create your own Facebook group

What really geeked me out and excited me was this thing called the Facebook group. It was this amazing little container that honestly functioned like a funnel. Immediately, I saw the Facebook group as a high converting sales funnel. They joined the group, you give them a free thing, they give you their email address. That’s the opt in page, sweet. So I fell in love. I simply fell in love with the Facebook group itself. 

How to start?

I always tell people to get comfortable posting into the void. There’s two slugs that are really challenging when you have a group. So the first slug is that zero to 100, that is the first difficult slug. You’ll spend an hour on this amazing post, you’re pouring your guts out. It’s like the Magna Carta of your life and you just post this thing, and nobody comments. So here’s how we actually prevent that. 

My original advice was, just get comfortable posting into the void. And it’s actually kind of a good thing in the beginning that nobody’s there. Why? Because you’re just finding your voice. You’re probably gonna suck a little bit. We all do in the beginning. So what’s gonna happen is if you continually show up and you’re doing the things both outside of your group and inside of your group that you should be doing, you will begin to attract your tribe. You’ll begin to attract those people. So in a way, it’s okay that they don’t see your early stuff, because your early stuff probably isn’t that great. You get better with practice, which is a blessing and a good thing. 

We kind of hacked this whole thing where now I recommend that people do not open their group, that they actually host what we call is a ‘group launch’. It’s a launch event, and you actually build up a ton of excitement out in other groups and on your profile. And what happens is, you don’t launch the group until you have at least a minimum of 100 to 250 people in the queue. What that does is it completely short-circuits and bypasses the need to post into the void where nobody’s in there and nobody’s paying attention. When you make a launch event and you let all 100, 250 whatever people in at a time it’s like here we go! They’re all coming in.

How to get more engagement in your group

Then that other slug from about a hundred to 500 is a little bit challenging. Because, again, you’re still not getting the engagement that you want. People are still timid. It’s a small group. Easiest way to get around that is in the very beginning, run a lot of challenges, a lot of engagement challenges, a lot of go live challenges. Tell us about yourself and incentivize them. So when you say, we’re going to run a fun seven day go live challenge, the winner of the challenge gets entered into a contest for tickets to FHL. And it doesn’t have to be as grandiose as tickets to FHL. It can be a $100 Amazon gift card. Whatever it is, we love free stuff.

Some people starting out might not have stuff to give away yet. That’s okay, reach out to other entrepreneurs who do. There’s a lot of those who are established that have free stuff that they’d be more than willing to give to you. Why? Because they’re gonna get leads and exposures to new audiences by doing that. That’s exactly what their free is for. So reach out to other entrepreneurs that have similar things to you, or things that your audience would be interested in, and they will give you free stuff and you can make yourself a goodie bag.

What happens is, you’re creating a culture of engagement. You’re letting people know it’s okay to engage. It’s okay to be seen. It’s okay to show up. And you’re also hacking the algorithm in your favor when you do have lots of engagement going on in your group, and then Facebook likes to show your group to lots of other people when you have an engaged group, which is why we care so much as group owners about engagement, because it gets us free traffic. 

Organic traffic on Facebook to promote and sell our online courses

I think that the cornerstone of any great organic marketing strategy is what is known as a profile funnel. Because your profile, that is your little corner of the universe on Facebook. Facebook is the third most visited website on earth. You’re standing right in the middle of a big rushing stream of traffic. You simply have to create a net that’s the right size, the right shape for your target audience. And your profile funnel actually serves as that net. 

The reason we call this a funnel is because in a funnel there’s only three options, buy, bookmark, or leave, that’s it. So the only way to learn more about what I’m doing or understand or get more info is to click the link. That’s it. That’s the only thing. So you should have a singular call to action. Everything should support that call to action. And by the way, you can run your profile funnel to your free lead magnet. 

How do we get more people in our Facebook group?

The way I see it, the objective here is to get your target audience from out there, into our captive fishbowl of a group, and then inside of the group, provide value and make an offer. Number one to do that is to find your dream clients. You need to get ultra freaking clear on your client avatar. Number two, you’re simply going to search Facebook for the groups where your dream clients might be hanging out and join those groups. 

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on three to five highly engaged groups. That’s it. You can’t be effective in more than three to five highly engaged groups. You want a mix of the following three types of groups that you’re going to join. Number one, you want to have at least one group that is the size of 15K members or higher, and that is highly engaged. Next, you’re going to join groups with 2K to 6K members that are moderately engaged, because it’s really easy to stand out in these groups. And then number three, you’re going to go into ultra niched, smaller but engaged groups, because it’s top of the food chain right here. 

Now you’re going to start providing value in those groups. You’re gonna be helpful. You’re gonna be supportive. You’re going to comment. You’re going to ask questions. You’re gonna engage. You’re gonna be funny when appropriate. You may be inspirational. Remember the saying ‘people will never remember what you did, but they’ll remember how you made them feel’. This is really important in this setting. And then you can even take a stand or be slightly polarizing or contrarian in a respectful way. What that does is that sets you apart. That makes people notice you. The intent is really to get noticed, so that people come back to your profile and get sucked right into your profile funnel, which at this point is probably pointing to your Facebook group. 

So you’ve provided value in the group. Now step three, you are making friends. You want to go into those very same groups and you’re going to add 50 targeted friends every single day that might be interested in your course. Once they accept you and you get little notifications at the top of your browser when they accept your friend request, then shoot them a quick personalized message. 

How to convert Facebook friends to buy your course

You want to artfully make an offer. Once you’ve started the conversation, you’ve begun building this relationship with them. And again, you need to be always more invested in the relationship than the sale. Relationship first, sale if appropriate later, but only then and only if appropriate. Always be interested in creating that network. We just determine if it’s a good fit, ask a couple of qualifying questions. If it’s a great fit, awesome. I send them to a webinar or lead magnet that sells my lower ticket stuff and they buy off that. 

Do you have a bit of a budget? Some people might look at this and go, I don’t have time to do all this stuff. This is exactly what virtual assistants can do for you. Find a fantastic virtual assistant and people can come in and do this for a very, very small amount of money in return for what you’re gonna get back from it.