The great thing about Facebook? Anyone (over the age of 13) can join. That opens up an unlimited amount of possibilities for your page and your groups. UNLIMITED. What you post, share and create has the potential to reach MILLIONS of people. Let that sink in for a minute. Mind-blowing.

(and I’m seriously giddy about being able to talk to you about this today)

First and foremost, let’s talk about the strategies behind Facebook groups.

What’s the Point of Growing a Group on Facebook?

Believe this. People love Facebook. But what I think that most people tend to overlook is that there is a difference between a Facebook group and a Facebook page. Are you one of them? Don’t worry, it’s really, really common.

From everything that I’ve learned, there are three ways that people interact on Facebook.

People will interact with your personal profile

They see your picture, and one to know you/talk to you. (And from building a Facebook page standpoint, this can be great. BUT, you can’t sell on your personal profile as it’s against Facebook’s terms of service)

Build Trust

When you interact with your community with your personal profile, it feels far more authentic than talking to a Facebook page. You can’t build trust without authenticity. 

Facebook users love to “like” and follow new pages

This is good news. You can run ads here and really target and connect with your audience. Having a page really gives you the potential to post videos, share content and bring in those potential customers with ease. 

Users love to use messenger to connect

Don’t forget about the hidden power of messenger. It’s a quick and simple way to get in touch with someone or create a “group chat” where you can target in on certain people even more. Messenger makes it easy to get in touch with people that you need and want to connect with. 

While all three ways are essential for interacting on Facebook, don’t forget these other quick tips, too.

You cannot run ads without a page. And you connect building a following with a group. 

It’s seriously as simple as that. 

Once you find your people that are perfect for your group, do well and they will stick around. Give them enough valuable information that they feel as though you’re solving their problems and if you can accomplish that, your Facebook group and communities will grow.

Groups thrive because everyone is there for the same reason. It’s like having your own personal cheerleading section for each and every question. How awesome is that?!

Use the Group Question Feature to Grow Your Email List

We’ve all seen those questions when joining Facebook groups. You can use them too, to build your email list! And we’ve learned from Sarah Mueller how powerful an email list can be. 

You’ve heard me mention a number of times to work smart, not harder, right? This strategy allows us to do just that.

Share Videos from Your Page

You created the content already why not use it to grow beyond your page? Share your video content from your page to your group. This gives you the opportunity to build custom audiences to retarget. This is extremely helpful, especially during launch time.

What is the point of having a Facebook group when I already have a Facebook page with thousands of fans? 

I’ll be the first to tell you that what works for some doesn’t work for all. You may be able to bypass a free group and offer some sort of paid group right out of the gate. It’s all in how you present the information and how well your audience believes in your message.

Everyone is different. All your followers and subscribers are looking for “something”. Some will be forever fans and will buy anything that you offer while others may need a little bit more convincing. Remember when I said that it takes putting content in front of people’s eyes 7 times before they decide to buy? THIS IS NOT A FAKE STATISTIC. Some people drag their feet a lot longer than others.

When I ran a free group, I was able to convert 1 out of every 7 users…that’s a pretty darn good number. (tooting my own horn here a bit) BUT, was there potential for it to be better? Possibly. 

That’s the beauty of using Facebook groups to your benefit. You have to find out what works for you. 

Is there a clear path to starting a Facebook group?

The short answer? No. While I’m here to provide guidance and answer questions, I also know that I’ve given the people in my groups enough breadcrumbs and information to find their path. THIS IS WHAT I LOVE TO DO.

In my own personal path, I started a free group first. And I had just 100 people. I used multiple page strategies and I taught them in their own time. Then, once I showed them that I was of value to them, I hammered them with sales. 

And while I was hammering them with sales, I was also their biggest cheerleader along the way, too. 

My goal and want? For my free group to be of huge value. Why? Because if they like what I have to offer, they’ll verbally tell others and my free group will join. All with little effort from me.

Winner-winner. 

I like giving people the tools to find success, but I want it to be a bit messy so that they still need to use the resources that I’m selling as well. I offer things to them in a very sequential way – and I do this on purpose. 

If I have nobody in my Facebook group, how do I even get started? 

When you have literally zero Facebook fans, zero fans on your page, zero fans in your group, you need to start “collecting” friends. Sounds a bit like a hoarder, right?

No shame.

When I started my journey on Facebook, I would meet different friends and connect with them. They were mainly blogging friends and we would talk about ways to blog and grow our audience. Keep in mind I knew none of them in real life. 

I decided that I needed to create an interest group on Facebook, and I messaged each of them (in like groups of 20) inviting them and creating this group. 

Once I had about 200-400 “friends”, I knew my group was set. 

If you have zero people in your Facebook group, you have to get out and connect with people so that they can learn about you and trust you. Once they do, you’ll find that they want to be a part of whatever you’re a part of. 

How can you actively grow your Facebook group?

The simple answer? You need to be present. Your group is there because of YOU and if they never see you, they don’t hold any value into what you’re posting. 

Show up. Deliver. Go live in the group. Have them ask questions that you actually respond to and answer. 

Make conversations with them every single day. And I mean that. Literally EVERY SINGLE DAY.

If you start your Facebook group with the mindset that you value them and their conversations, you’re setting yourself up for a path towards solid success. 

As your Facebook group grows, should you have moderators to help?

YES. If you can find someone that knows your page, your mission and has your voice, let them help you! You don’t want your group to have to wait for information and answers. This is where moderators are HUGE. 

The time is now to start a Facebook group. Why wait? If you wait, success will never come. And don’t worry, you’ll learn a lot along the way, and I’m here to help as well.

Find your passion for helping others and creating amazing content that just can’t be missed out on. Facebook groups and pages are one easy and simple way to make this happen. 

The post The Power of Growing a Group – Leveraging Your Audience appeared first on Rachel Miller.

• “Who are you?”
• “What’s most important to you?”
• “What are your struggles?”

The answers to these questions unlock all the resources you need to take to transition your business from zero to MASSIVE. One of my mentors, Ryan Levesque, did exactly that. He created the ASK Method and went from zero to $25K per month in 18 months!!!

I found that there’s a path to making money online and that is to ask people what they’re struggling with in a market to understand their pains, their needs, their wants and desires. Then from there build your products and services based on that. – Ryan Levesque

Engage Your Audience on an Emotional Level

So, guys, there’s a clear difference between connecting with your audience’s heart and following trends, right? Yes, it seems like great money to be a part of the uptick. But, ask any surfer, you’ll completely wipeout if you paddle when the wave is right there. 

For Ryan, that was no different. He saw a trending market in Scrabble tile jewelry on Etsy. But what happened?

We took this business to making almost $8,000 a month in a tiny little niche market starting from scratch. Now the story doesn’t have like a super happy ending because like it, it turns out it was a fad. 

Finding Pain Points NOT Fads

Clearly fads, well they fade, don’t they? That’s not a dependable long-term marketing strategy.  

You want a business that’s going to stand the test of time. 

So true! We don’t want to repeat the build and launch over and over and over. That’s extremely exhausting! I don’t know any entrepreneur who sets a goal to create a cycle of insanity. Seriously, that’s the complete opposite of “working smarter not harder.”

When I first started beta testing Moolah, I had a handful of people participating. It was within this tight-knit group that I built the Page Strategies e-course you know and love today. 

I applied Ryan Levesque’s ASK Method during the beta launch. And well, you can see for yourself, that Moolah has grown by leaps and bounds. I listened to my audience’s pain points about Facebook as it relates to their business. Guys, at that point I knew I had the skill set to build pages from zero to a million. I had done multiple times. I wanted to share that with knowledge, but I needed to be clear in my messaging, course outline, and lessons so that it really solved my students’ pain points.

Ryan did the same thing with his orchid business. 

I learned my lesson. I said, all right, if we’re going to go into another market, we’re going to go into a market that is not a fad. And so I picked a market that’s the longest, a lasting oldest hobbies in America, which is a sub-niche in gardening. The gardening niche that we went into was specifically caring for (orchids). 

Ryan and I were both able to use our audience to identify pain points. But how did we get to the point where we had an audience to engage with?

The Audience to ASK

We’ve talked about that in our niches where we want to target not just anyone in the niche. We only want our pages to target the most active people who are responding, the ones that can’t help themselves. This ties right in. He picked orchids because it had that high engagement, high activity level inside that niche. So, I love that he reached out where people were already buzzin’.

We started asking these questions and I started identifying that in the market…that there were these pockets of what we call “hyper-responsives”. 

Did you catch this in the interview? You don’t need a website, friends. What you do need is a niche and you need people to start engaging with. Those are the key foundational pieces. It’s not the fancy designer built website or even the product itself. It’s the niche and audience!

Biggest mistake people make is they build something and then try to sell it.  The aspect of that the thing that’s come to be known as the aspect of the process that I’ve learned along the way is that you begin by asking questions to understand what it is that your audience wants and in response to those answers, you create something that you know they want to buy. 

The 3 Steps in the ASK Method that Will Help You Engage Your Audience

Pssst…you’ll definitely want to get on the waitlist to Ryan’s ASK Method program to really dive into all these steps.

Discovery: We’re not jumping right in and asking people what they want because that’s not always easy to answer for anyone. The goal is to reveal what they don’t want.

When you ask these types of questions, that’s one example, then you can start to understand what it is that your audience might actually want to buy.

Y’all I implemented this stage first too. I asked our non-buyers the question, “why didn’t you buy?” And it was mindblowing. 5% of them had the same answer. Well, guess what? I knew exactly what my next bonus was going to be. I thought this was a no-brainer. It’s so awesome the power of what happens when you interview your audience and you’re able to segment them. Now I know two things that I can easily create as bonuses or have somebody else create as a bonus for my program that will answer those issues.

Segmentation: Because there’s no one size fits all way to engage with people, we need to communicate with our audience in different ways. In order to understand that “groups” in our audience, we need to start segmenting them into buckets. 

So, here’s the thing with Moolah, up until just recently, we still sent people to the same sales page. However, they had the perceived customization because they came in telling me a little bit about their needs. So there was a perceived feeling like I’m getting something that’s just for me, even though I didn’t have time, make another sales page.

In every market there are three to five hyper-responsive buckets of people that you want to focus. 

Launch: Finally the last piece to the puzzle, maybe? Well, now that you know your audience and how to talk to them, it’s definitely time to launch. You can put all that information your audience shared with you to work.

Using the ASK Method, I was able to grow Moolah Marketing by…

• finding people in a specific stage of their business growth
• listening to their needs and pain points
• and creating the solutions to sell. 

BUT, here’s the kicker…I know, I know, I can’t just give you all of Ryan’s secrets right??? These steps are just a birdseye view of the ASK Method. Ryan’s program may not be open for enrollment right now, so grab these goodies while you wait.

• The Ultimate Audience Growth Pack – Jump right ahead to the full pack of worksheets to get your business to the next level.
• 23 Conversation starters to jumpstart engagement on your page.

The post 3 Steps to Engage Your Audience and EARN in Any Niche appeared first on Rachel Miller.