From Zero to 66K Views in 3 months: My Facebook Site Experiment

The following is a copy of the email sent to the newsletter subscribers on August 13, 2023. Use the form at the top of the page to subscribe.

Recently, I’ve been exploring the possibilities of using Facebook to boost site traffic, and I think I’ve stumbled onto something worth sharing.

It’s been a journey of experiments, discoveries, and learning from failures. In this email, I’ll take you through my experiences with a Facebook-facing site that has seen surprising growth.

From the strategies I’ve employed to the lessons I’ve learned along the way, I hope these insights might resonate with some of you. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s an interesting piece of the puzzle.

A few days ago I tweeted this –

I was thrilled about that site making it to the 50K monthly views point because this turns it into a Mediavine-eligible site. And one that could potentially be sold down the road to buyers who are not currently Mediavine publishers.

Actually, as a Mediavine Premiere publisher, I get to board my sites to Mediavine as soon as they have a few thousand pageviews. Unfortunately, Google requires sites to be at least four months old before they can show ads, so this specific site isn’t monetized just yet (except through a few Amazon links that brought in $89 in the last 30 days).

I wasn’t aware of the four-month limit for display ads until I applied with this site last month. You see, I never had a site hit as much as 5,000 monthly pageviews before it turned four months old.

With Google traffic, it typically takes 9-12 months to start seeing significant traffic from a site.

Turns out it’s much faster with Facebook traffic.

In fact, when I went to grab a screenshot for this email, I noticed the site was blessed with another spike a few days ago, putting it at the 66K monthly pageviews point.

And that’s actually not the only site where we’re seeing success with generating Facebook traffic. Not even the one with the most traffic.

However, it’s a test site created solely for this Facebook experiment, so I thought I’d share some insights here.

Our Facebook strategy: A recap

I was not the one who came up with this strategy. It was shared in great detail in the Fat Stacks forums (members only) and covered here by Alic Hasib from Strevio:

How to grow your Facebook traffic blog post

It goes something like this –

• Create a Facebook page around your niche.
• Run paid campaigns to get page followers.
• Post on your page, sending people back to your site.

Sounds simple, right?

I still managed to fail miserably during the first few months of following this strategy. Fortunately, I had some good people, including Alic himself, help me out with some tips.

Some days, I felt like we would never crack this thing. I was very close to giving up.

I started by outsourcing the work to one of our team members. She was great with creating engagement on the pages. Really good. Millions of views and shares to some of the posts.

But no traffic to the site.

I took over for a while, applying a different approach. I had to immerse myself in the pages to do that, but I could see the numbers improve. I could see the potential.

Then, I had to leave for a month and go on our road trip. I left two of the pages in the hands of a very capable and experienced team member. He applied a more analytical approach, using Strevio and data from Google Analytics, and finally scored! With both pages!

In fact, with the other site, we had a total of more than 150,000 pageviews from Facebook over the last 28 days.

Case Study Site Numbers

As mentioned, this is a brand new site, launched in May 2023. The niche is a small niche within the Home & Garden vertical.

The Facebook page was launched around the same time, as soon as we had the first few dozen articles. It now has 27K likes. Most of them were gained through paid Facebook campaigns.

The site itself currently has 109 published posts.

We spent a total of $1530 on buying likes.

As you can see from these charts, there were bursts of campaigns. We stopped buying likes a few weeks ago. The page likes count is still growing organically, albeit not at the same rate.

If you divide $1530 by 27,000 likes, you’ll get a cost of 5.5 cents per like on average. But since some of those likes were organic, I would put the cost per like at 7 cents per like on average.

I have other sites in the same niche, so I expect the site to have an RPM of $25-$30. There’s a good chance it will cover the cost of likes within a month of revenue. I just need to wait one more month before we apply to Mediavine again.

Insights from this case study

Now that I’ve shared the numbers and screenshots, here are a few insights from this case study. These are things I need to be reminded of, so thanks for being my sounding board and making me sit down and think about them!

I’ll start with a couple of Facebook-specific insights and move on to more general lessons.

It’s not just a question of posting more

We started out by posting very engaging content on our Facebook pages. Turns out, that’s easy to do. People love funny memes and pictures and will like and share them ad nauseam.

Which won’t get your site traffic.

The key to getting posts that drive traffic was to experiment. A lot.

We had to figure out which posts actually send us traffic and which are duds. Then, double down on what works, digging in further and creating more content using the same kind of concepts.

This is a mix of immersion – you have to spend a LOT of time staring at posts and numbers – and an analytical approach.

Staring at posts and numbers can be done through the Facebook analytics interface, but my team (and myself) prefer using Strevio.

Strevio does two things for us –

First, it shows us the same stats Facebook Analytics does, but in a way that’s easier to digest. It also shows you the actual post alongside the numbers. IMHO, that really helps the immersion aspect.

Strevio also reveals the most successful posts by other pages in the niche. Granted, you can’t tell how many clicks they actually had, but you can see likes, shares, and comments per post. Combined with your understanding of how those translate into clicks in your niche, this is great intel to have.

Strevio isn’t cheap, but if you’re serious about your Facebook strategy, it may be worth it for you. And there’s a free trial, so you can try it out and see if it works for you.

Click here to try Strevio for free.

Understanding what works and what doesn’t work in your niche and for your audience is crucial. And it leads to the other key to Facebook success:

Facebook-oriented content

As you may know, we struggled with Facebook traffic for quite a while. I asked several experienced Facebook folks to take a look at my Facebook pages and all of them said right away:

You’re promoting the wrong kind of content.

Not one of them could say with confidence what the right content for my niche would be. But their years of experience generated enough of an intuition to tell me that what we were doing wasn’t good enough.

And they were right, of course.

We managed to break through Facebook’s glass ceiling only after a long immersion in Strevio’s environment, followed by creating content that was geared toward Facebook.

And since there were no competitors with content in the specific niche of this site, this is how I approached creating new topics:

I collected a couple of dozens of article titles from sites in similar niches. I based my selection on Strevio’s reports on their most successful posts.

Next, I went to ChatGPT (GPT4) and asked for ideas on how to create similar posts in our niche. It did not disappoint, coming up with some new topics that I would have never thought of.

From there, it was easy.

I added the topics to the site’s content plan spreadsheet and from there it went into our production line. Using Koala and our AI Wrangling method, we quickly had a bunch of decent articles to share on Facebook.

And it turns out the Facebook experts had been right all along. Facebook-oriented content worked much better. From this point, it was – and still is – a matter of digging into what works best and trying to create more content in the same vein.

Don’t give up too soon

That would be my next insight. And one I need to remind myself of.

Traffic is a long-term game. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get traffic from Facebook, Google, Pinterest or a mailing list. It’s going to take time to figure things out and make it work.

It’s always a leap of faith that requires a huge investment of time and often of funds as well.

Nothing is guaranteed. You could also fail. But if you’re taking that jump, stay at it for a while and try to improve and work your way towards actually making it work. Don’t give up too soon.

Last, but not least, it’s a team effort

I’m grateful to the team member who took the time to employ the lessons I detailed above and actually make it all work.

In my case, it’s not my personal success. It’s the company’s success. Each team member contributes to the bigger picture of our sites’ success.

This site’s success is no different – it’s the result of a team effort.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it, a snapshot of my journey with Facebook, filled with ups, downs, and a few surprises.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’m excited about what we’ve managed to achieve.