THE ETHICAL WAY TO MAKE MONEY WITH FACEBOOK

Make Money With Facebook 

GETTING IN ON THE ACTION

Social networking holds the promise of being the next biggest marketing 

arena in town. However, the rules are far different on social networks like 

Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for marketers than they are for conventional 

formats like television ads or direct marketing campaigns. A more subtle 

approach is required because of the policy that many of the social networks 

do not allow direct solicitation of their members. Even so, you can see that 

making money online on a place like Facebook can be done, just not as 

directly as with other types of revenue-making sites.

BEING GENUINE

One of the ways that marketing on Facebook differs tremendously than from 

other types of sites is that authenticity counts. You can't just put up a 

Facebook page and expect to gain fans or to be befriended, unless you have 

something to offer people in these networks. Generally, the currency is 

yourself and how interesting and how much you contribute to the

community.

Set up a profile that shows who you are and why people would like to 

befriend you, and they will be more likely to associate with you. Place tons of 

links and spam about your commercial ventures before generating a personal 

relationship with your audience and you're either likely to get ignored or to 

lose friends. In the worst cases, the administrators of the site might suspend 

your account if you actively solicit people via Facebook email like you would 

during a regular Internet marketing campaign. There are some things you 

can do on these sites to make money, and there are some that are clearly 

against the terms of service. Spamming people's inboxes for commercial 

purposes is strictly forbidden.

HOW DOES ONE MAKE MONEY, THEN?

Obviously, you have to start by generating traffic to your profile. From there, 

you have a number of social strategies to gain attention from your friends 

and to have sales opportunities. In some cases, like the Marketplace, an 

application that allows you to buy and sell things to users of Facebook, you 

are allowed to sell something directly on Facebook. Other times, you are 

going to have to get creative and learn ways to make things that people on 

Facebook want, like applications, and use them to generate income.

There are also Social Ads, a place to buy advertising for your products and 

services online. You can even use them to advertise affiliate offers that you 

are marketing. You can use leverage from one advertising program, like 

Google, and combine it with Social ads to get more traffic to your offers and

get some clicks too. These are just a few ways and we will discuss many 

more.

THE MARKETPLACE

You can load this application from the main Facebook page via the toolbar at 

the bottom of your Facebook interface. It will allow you to add items via 

geographical location to the Marketplace. There are different areas in the 

Marketplace. There is an “Items for Sale” area, Housing, Vehicles, and Jobs. 

You can add your own listing to any one of these areas, but the audience will 

be filtered by geographical results.

LOCAL SALES

Your results and the results that others see are based on the geographical 

region you put in your profile. This can be changed to view a wider 

geographical region of sales, but for the most part, they will be local sales 

that you see, and you have to deliberately change this setting to see results 

from other geographical regions. That means that if you are a local business, 

it can be a great way to advertise some of your offerings. If you want buyers 

from all over the globe, it'll be harder to use this part of Facebook for your 

offerings. However, there are other ways to get people back to your sites to 

market to them later.

THREE WAYS TO ADVERTISE

1. Sell It 

Pretty self-explanatory. You are going to put a price on some item and 

try to sell it. There are multiple categories that you can choose from to 

keep your sales item more highly visible. 

2. Give It Away 

Used for pets, but could be used to give away a freebie that is 

associated with your business. Just because you're not selling 

something doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to collect more friends 

or traffic back to your profile via this way.

3. Ask For It 

Generally, this is for buyers who are wanting a particular item. It isn't 

for selling things, but it's still in the Marketplace because people may 

have trouble finding what they want. You can check these ads to see if 

you have something someone else wants and then sell it to him/her.

WAYS TO USE THE MARKETPLACE

Even if you are selling real estate, you can go and post a ad in housing. If 

you are a car dealer, you could use the vehicles area to sell a car. Any other 

type of item will most likely go in the “Items For Sale” area. Try to stick to 

the terms of service and only offer products that don't get your account 

banned. 

SOCIAL ADS

Advertising is a viable way to get traffic to your sites and offers, and 

Facebook has its own version of advertising called Social Ads. These 

advertisements can be very finely tuned due to the demographic data that 

Facebook collects on all of its users. You can use social ads to advertise your 

own offerings or applications on Facebook that you create. There is no 

restriction to advertising your own offerings even though it's a social network 

site. You do have to pay for the service, and it is one of the ways in which 

Facebook generates income, but it also can generate income for you too if 

properly used.

CPC AND CPM

All you have to do is to set up a campaign, either a CPC (cost-per-click) or 

CPM (cost-per-impression) model. In the CPC model, you will pay an agreed 

upon price for each click that is generated from your advertising. In the CPM 

model, you will pay per every 1000 impressions, which is how many times 

your ad was loaded onto a Web page. Either way, you can set up great 

advertisements within a budget that is suitable for you.

UTILIZE FACEBOOK’S DEMOGRAPHIC DATA

Next, you will want to figure out who you will target with your campaign. You 

can set various demographic restrictions on your ad, which would be nearly 

impossible to do elsewhere. That's because Facebook collects all of this data 

and serves up ads based on who you tell it to serve, not based on keywords 

or large groups of undefined or unknown people. When you create an ad 

campaign in Facebook, you can be assured that it is being served up to 

people in the demographic you have targeted, thereby increasing the 

potential for income.

MAKE MONEY ADVERTISING WITH FACEBOOK

In addition to advertising your website, your links, and your affiliate offers, 

you can also advertise your events and applications within Facebook. This will 

generate a lot more attention for these areas and can produce income if 

more people attend your event or if your application goes viral. At some 

point, you can sell the application and generate income that way too.

Social ads appear to the left of everyone's profile. They show up exactly how 

you tell Facebook to post them, and they are very popular with users. As 

long as you only advertise things that are in accordance with Facebook's 

policies, it is an ethical way to promote your offerings on Facebook without 

offending anyone by spamming.

CREATE AN APPLICATION

Applications are third party software applications created by programmers 

that can be selected and downloaded by users of Facebook to perform some 

function or to entertain them. It may come as a surprise to know that 

YouTube was once just an application embedded within MySpace and it grew 

so popular that it eventually got its own website, and the rest is history. 

There is big money in applications, and creating them is not that hard, even 

if you're not a programmer. You just need a good idea.

OUTSOURCE CREATION

You can hire programmers on Elance.com or RentACoder.com who would be 

willing to create an application for you if it is really complicated. Some 

applications like L'il Green are very popular with users and are just galleries 

of graphic flowers to add to your garden. When you get sent a flower or a 

plant, it plants it in your garden. You can see other people's gardens and 

water and care for them too. By doing so, you can earn Greenbucks, with 

which you can buy other things on L'il Green. However, there are ways to 

buy plants using real money too. You can promote specific offers on your 

application since you put in the advertising too. It can lead to offers that 

make you a lot of money through referrals or commissions. The more popular 

an application becomes, the more people will tell their friends about it and 

get them to join. This can really increase the exposure of your audience.

MATCH THE APPLICATION TO YOUR 

DEMOGRAPHIC

L'il Green works because it targets people who like gardening. Other offers 

that you can get will be related to this niche. Similarly, if most of your offers 

are about dating, you application should be related to personality profiles, 

matching interests, and so on. Always match the application to whom you

plan to market with it later. You won't get much money initially just from 

rolling out an application as people subscribe to it for free. You have to lay 

the groundwork for further income or for selling it to someone within that 

niche from the start. Otherwise, you risk spending money to outsource the 

creation and making none back.

CREATE YOUR OWN FOR A TEST

If you want to test an idea, and your application is mostly just images and 

nothing fancy, you can create your own application within Facebook fairly 

easily. Just fill the gallery of images and see if you attract people to install 

the application and what happens next. It's a fairly easy way to break into 

application creation without investing too much money into programmers. 

BECOME A CELEBRITY

Facebook and MySpace are two great social networking sites for artists and 

musicians. If your aim is to become a celebrity, you can build up a fan base 

online with Facebook very easily by adding a Facebook page and inviting 

people to become a fan of yours. In a way, it is like a website within 

Facebook that doesn't have the same restrictions for solicitation that other 

areas of Facebook have to follow. Here, you can self-promote and add 

whatever links you want to add to your Facebook page. It's expected that 

that's why you put up a Facebook page instead of adding a profile.

You can even add a Facebook page for your business instead of just your 

profile and try to gain fame and attention that way. Whatever you put on 

your Facebook page, you will attract people to your group and be able to 

engage them more personally without having to do it via your profile. You 

can send out mass emails this way and even set up discussion groups. You 

can advertise new music or art creations when they first come out and 

generate excitement for your products immediately. Being a celebrity online 

is easy.

NOTHING ATTRACTS ATTENTION LIKE FAME

When people gather into a crowd, it seems to grow exponentially. Everyone 

wants to know what's so interesting. The same is true of your Facebook 

page. If you gain a core group of followers, other people might think that 

you're worth knowing and will become a fan or befriend you too. In addition, 

Facebook has a policy of showing the friends of friends who people are 

becoming fans of or are adding to their groups on the status feeds. The more 

people you add, the more people you have the potential to add. That's why

your first order of the day is to make sure that you add significant numbers 

to your Facebook page.

Invite people on your own contact list to become a fan of your page if you 

have one. That's the basis for a good start. Put in a Social Ad to advertise 

your Facebook page to reach people outside of your friends list and their 

friends lists too. Add your direct link to your email signatures and other 

correspondence so people know that they can add you to their Facebook 

page.

SEND OUT NOTICES OF NEW CREATIONS

As a musician, you can even dedicate songs to people on your friends list. 

This is a great way to advertise your offerings because these people are sure 

to be curious. You can add images of gallery offerings online and promote 

specials that you are offering. Like any gallery affair, always advertise if 

you've sold something. This way, other people know that you are selling to 

others, and that makes you appear even more valuable.

HOST AN EVENT

It may seem like you can't get people offline from Facebook, but that's far 

from the truth. You can use Facebook to help advertise local events and 

some online events too. When you host an event on Facebook, you can 

advertise the entrance fee if it is somewhere offline. Most other events are 

free, and money is made by soliciting people onto an email list via the event 

announcement and marketing to them offline or through a website after that.

GET A TEAM OF EXPERTS TOGETHER

If you have a number of friends in the same industry who all are looking to 

make some extra money, you can offer an online event where they share 

their expertise via interviews on a set date and time. People have to sign up 

to your event that has been publicized on Facebook; they are then sent an 

email telling them what website will be hosting the virtual meetup. Once they 

get there, you now have the opportunity to get an offline email address. This 

is essential to maintaining an ethical way to market to them later. You want 

permission to contact them and to solicit them for your products and 

services, and you can't really do that very well on Facebook. You have to 

take them offline to your website and get their email address. Hosting an 

event on Facebook that is taking place somewhere else online is a perfect 

way to gain trust and to get people to sign up and identify themselves 

outside of Facebook.

Provide some value back to the people who sign up and make sure you do 

the event. You can offer freebies for people signing up, like ebooks and 

videos to help wet their appetites. You can allow the experts to self-promote 

via their products and services during the interview. In the end, you will have 

the email address, and you'll be the one in a position to market to them 

offline through an email campaign, completely unrelated to Facebook and, 

thus, not subject to their restrictions. However, the magic did start with 

Facebook.

ADVERTISE YOUR LOCAL EVENTS TOO

Maybe you want to know approximately how many people might attend an 

offline event, but don't know how. Add it to your Facebook event page and 

then notify people of the event via email. There is an option for people to 

RSVP, and that will give you some idea of which of your online friends is 

expecting to attend the event. It's also a good idea because, if your friend 

clicks that he/she is attending or may be attending, it shows up in his/her 

status feed, and their friends see it too. Thus, you automatically notify more 

people through advertising it on Facebook via an events page. It's also a 

great way to spell out the details of the event and to keep everyone updated. 

Is there an entrance fee or is it free? Will you be giving away prizes? 

Anything you can add to the event to bring people in is a good idea.

SELL YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA 

EXPERTISE

If you've been on Facebook for a while, you have an advantage over others 

who may just be starting to figure out this social networking platform. You 

can use that expertise to help others gain more exposure for themselves and 

for their businesses, and it's not hard to locate such folks. If this is 

something that interests you, you can set yourself up as a coach for other 

newbie Facebook entrepreneurs and get paid to help others succeed.

YOUR OWN PROFILE WILL SELL YOUR SKILLS

Have hundreds of friends? Have a Facebook page with hundreds of friends? 

The more people you've attracted to your own page, the more likely that 

people will believe that you are a Facebook guru. However, it's not hard to 

get people to link to you. Just send out multiple friend requests every day 

until you build up your list. It's a very common practice to start with your 

friends and then open their friends’ pages. Request to befriend the friend of 

your friends. Usually, they will let you in because they will see that you are a 

mutual friend. If you keep doing this repeatedly, but not in the hundreds

each day (since Facebook will kick you out for spamming), you will eventually 

build up a big list of people who can vouch for you, even if they've never met 

you.

OFFER TO HELP PEOPLE BUILD THEIR 

FACEBOOK PROFILES

You can get work by offering to set up people's Facebook profiles, especially 

business owners who may not want to spend too much time online. You can 

set up a Facebook page too for someone else and just give him/her the 

reigns when you're done. This way, they can start out on a good foot and 

gain ground much faster.

SELL INFOPRODUCTS ON HOW TO MARKET 

FACEBOOK

Along with acting like a coach or consultant, you can also sell infoproducts to 

help people understand how to best use Facebook and how to make cash 

from it too. If you've found some interesting ways to market on Facebook, 

and it makes money for other people, you can bet that people will pay money 

for the information. 

As long as you are offering these infoproducts in areas within Facebook that 

allow you to market these products, you are fine. You can put up a link in a 

status update to show people when you have a new offering, but that is close 

to spamming. The best way to promote your infoproducts on Facebook is to 

have a Facebook page where you add links to your offerings so you don't 

violate the terms of service.

BLOG YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS 

ON FACEBOOK

Blogging is a great way to start getting noticed on the Internet. Once you set 

up a blog, you can use it to advertise your affiliate offers, promote your own 

products, generate a subscribers’ list, and gain money through advertising. 

There is no blog feature within Facebook, but it is an excellent place to 

network with other bloggers to increase traffic to your Web log. Once you 

understand the dynamics of how this can increase your friends, this will give 

you more opportunities to create venture partnerships.

JOIN NETWORKEDBLOGS ON FACEBOOK

NetworkedBlogs is an application that allows people on Facebook to promote 

and advertise their blogs within the Facebook community. By adding 

NetworkedBlogs to your Facebook account, you can then put up your own 

blog and invite people within Facebook to join it. You can categorize your 

blog to make it easy for people to find it. For instance, if you have a blog 

about finances and your products and services are in this niche, then make 

sure you include that category for your blog.

Try to get people to rate your blog on NetworkedBlogs, as it will make other 

people more interested in checking you out. Put in a description that entices 

people to check you out and to invite friends on your profile to join your 

networked blog.

TO GAIN MASSIVE EXPOSURE, TRY THIS

Here is the main way you're going to leverage Facebook to get massive 

exposure and traffic back to your website: Network with other bloggers in 

your niche. All you have to do is to use the NetworkedBlogs application to go 

and join the blogs of other good bloggers within your niche. They will often 

reciprocate by checking out and joining your blog too. This gives you more 

credibility and helps you to attract more attention from people within 

Facebook who are in your targeted demographic.

USE THE STATUS UPDATES TO PROMOTE YOUR 

BLOG

You can use NetworkedBlogs to publish your new postings to your profiles as 

a link within your status update box. You should do this several times for 

each post during the day. Once is not enough, as people log in at different 

times throughout the day. If people comment on the post, the people within 

the commentator’s friends circle will see your posting too and will give you 

optimal exposure to gain new subscribers within your target demographic. 

PROMOTE YOUR OTHER PAY-

PER-VIEW CONTENT

If you are a writer and have a way with words, you've probably noticed that 

some sites are willing to pay you based on the number of people who view 

your content. AssociatedContent is one such site, and you can gain many 

more views if you know how to promote your information on different social 

networking sites, not just on Facebook. It is perfectly ethical to do, as you 

are not soliciting people to buy your content; you are being paid for the 

traffic that goes to that site. 

 Thisdoesn't just work with writing sites; it also works for YouTube.com. If 

you want to get more people to visit your video, just promote it on your 

social network via your profile and relevant groups. You will see a large 

increase in your traffic, and subsequently, in the performance pay that you 

get from Google Partners programs. Even places like Squidoo.com and 

Hubpages.com offer performance pay that can be increased with the proper 

promotion on your social networking profile. Here's how to do it.

USE THE STATUS UPDATE WISELY

Once you publish anything on these performance sites, go to your Facebook 

account and publish the link in your status update. This will promote it to 

your friends. Give it a while and see if anyone comments; if not, post it 

again. If they do comment, always answer each comment, no matter how 

trivial. The reason for this is that every time someone comments, it shows up 

on the left for people within your friends group and the commentator's 

friends group too. Thus, every time someone comments or you comment, it 

gets promoted once again. 

USE GROUPS TO PROMOTE YOUR PAY-PER-

VIEW CONTENT

You can also join groups on Facebook that are relevant to the pay-per-view 

content that you are trying to promote. It's always good to have just a few 

niches; that way, you won't have to constantly find a new group to join. Go 

in, contribute to the conversation, and then add your link to your pay-per-

view content. As long as you aren't soliciting people to buy from you, this is 

perfectly permissible. If it so happens that someone else is paying you to get 

viewers to read your stuff, that's just icing on the cake for you. You are 

contributing to the conversation, people are talking about your content, and 

you are getting paid. What's nice is that no one is upset, no one is 

spamming, and no one is violating the terms of service posted by Facebook.

AUTOMATE AS MUCH AS YOU 

CAN

All these strategies have one thing in common: They take time and work. 

What if you don't want to do all that or find that it takes up so much time 

that you don't have time to figure out how to develop products, get affiliate 

offers, or even consult? Frankly, it is a lot of work, but the workload can be 

reduced so that when you do things in one area of the Internet, Facebook 

gets updated without much intervention from you.

SELECTIVE TWITTER

One other social network that is particularly powerful to combine with 

Facebook is Twitter. Twitter can be a way to add thousands of people to your 

profile very quickly, and you can send status updates directly from Twitter to 

Facebook by downloading the Selective Twitter application. Now, when you 

are promoting stuff on Twitter via their 140-character update, you can add 

the hash tag #fb to the end and it will also automatically post your update to 

Facebook. Now, both audiences are informed.

WHEN YOU HAVE STUFF ALL OVER

What if you have stuff on Twitter and you want to also promote to 

Delicious.com or StumbleUpon, as well as Facebook? Now you need to 

centralize your promotional activities by getting a URL shortener like Ping.fm. 

This serves two purposes. It keeps your URLs short enough for people not to 

be overwhelmed. More importantly, it allows you to track the performance of 

the short links and allows you to post to multiple social networking sites all 

over the Internet, including Facebook.

TRACK PERFORMANCE

In order to tweak your marketing efforts with Facebook, you need to know 

what is working and what isn't. For that, the URL shortener is indispensable. 

Some URL shorteners will tell you how many people clicked on a link and 

when. It will tell you what country they are from. It will tell you if the link 

was emailed or shared. This type of information is invaluable to network 

marketers who are trying to determine where their efforts are best spent. 

If you try one set of activities in this report and you're not getting much 

response, check if people are even seeing your offers. If they don't see them, 

they can't respond to them. It's as simple as that. Once you know that 

you've got traffic, then you can start to decide why some things sell and why 

other things don't. Until then, it's probably a traffic issue, and you need to 

concentrate on getting the word out where it gives you the most exposure. 

Facebook is an excellent tool for networking and for getting different types of 

work, but it's not a panacea for poor marketing practices. If anything is true, 

it's that you do have to have more understanding of how to market a product 

or service than you would in a regular retail environment. You have to use a 

casual and friendly tone, and you're never allowed to spam anyone. Learning 

how to make money while contributing value is the key. From there, you can 

definitely find numerous, ethical ways to make money on Facebook.