The $5 Facebook Page Marketing Strategy for Authors

With more than one billion people on Facebook, creating a Facebook Page to promote you and your work can be a great opportunity to build your readership. But advertising through Facebook can make you feel overwhelmed. Facebook has reduced its organic (free) reach and regularly changes its algorithms and features, causing Facebook marketing to be like hitting a moving target when it comes to figuring out what works best.

Thankfully, you don't need an advanced degree or a lot of money to reach more people. In fact, you can start with as little as $5 by following the proven strategy below. But first, there’s one important point to make prior to discussing Facebook Page marketing strategy and tactics.

Be Social on Facebook

People are on Facebook to primarily do one thing: be social.

You see, we generally do not have a purchasing mindset when we use Facebook. Whether we’re scrolling our newsfeed, directly interacting with our family and friends, or in some cases, just distracting ourselves, we do not normally search Facebook for a specific item or an answer to a question as we would with Google, YouTube, and Pinterest.

As an author, this means your Facebook marketing tactics need to mirror the behavior of people using Facebook. The authors of Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customersexplain, “The goal of social ads is often awareness-oriented, not conversion-oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line.” Practically speaking, as an author you should aim to leverage your Facebook Page to create awareness, start a conversation, and build a trustworthy relationship with your Facebook followers.

Now that we have this groundwork laid, here are the steps to develop a $5 Facebook Page marketing strategy for authors.

  1.     Create an Offer

This Facebook Page strategy builds directly upon developing an email marketing strategy. So, assuming you have an email service provider, such as MailChimp, Aweber, or ConvertKit, the next step is to create an offer for people when they sign up for your email newsletter.

This offer needs to be free, add value to your audience, and it can take the form of countless options, such as:

• Email series
• Audio book
•  Toolkit
• eBook
• Webinar
• And more…

With your offer in place, you’re ready to move forward with the next step.

 2.     Blog about Your Offer

Keeping in mind the conversational nature of Facebook, write a blog post to promote your offer. Now, don't be salesy with this blog post. Create a piece of shareable content by providing value for your audience.

Within this blog post, you can directly promote your email opt-in offer or you can do so indirectly. Here are examples from Lucid Books:

•  [Free Guide] The Writing Tips Checklist: 25 Essential Steps to Writing a Book (Direct  Offer)
•  5 Writing Tips from Donald Miller (Indirect Offer)

The first example (direct) directly appeals to authors interested in writing a book and directly promotes our free guide. Now, the second example (indirect) appeals to writers who are interested in learning writing tips and indirectly promotes our email opt-in offer in the pop-up and the newsletter at the bottom.

Both of these tactics work well for different reasons. But, I don't want to bog you down in those details at the moment. Let’s move on to the next step for the time being.

 3. Promote Your Offer on Your Facebook Page

Now that you’ve written a blog post and have published it to your website, the next thing you want to do is publish it to your Facebook Page.

After you publish your post to your page, you’re going to see this nifty option:

Click on “Boost Post.” Once you do this, you will see these options to choose from:

For now, promote to “People who like your Page.” This will ensure the offer you created and the blog post you wrote for your target audience will have great reception. Why? Because people who have already liked your page will resonate with your work more than others who have not.

Now, scroll down to Budget and Duration. For Total budget, select or manually type in $5.00. At this point, Facebook will provide an estimate of how many people you will reach.

With a $5 budget, you will only be able to promote your blog post for 1 to 3 days since Facebook requires a $1 per day minimum. Regardless of whether you choose 1, 2, or 3 days, remember this: The duration does not influence how many people will see your promotion, only when they will see it.

Making this Work for You

This $5 Facebook Page Marketing Strategy will help drive people to your offer and engage with your content.

There are a ton of variables to test with Facebook. But, don't let this bog you down for now. The best thing to do is get started.

Also, another important facet to test is seeing how many people opt-in to your email newsletter after they visited your website. These numbers will help you see if you need to make adjustments to your offer, blog post, and more.