How I’m Getting Facebook Page Likes For Under A Penny

I recently started a Facebook page from scratch, with the goal of building a profitable audience for as little as I possibly could, and the results are exciting.

You’re about to learn how I’ve been getting real page likes for as little as half a cent, and how these likes can be used to make you money. Seriously.

Here’s The Catch

I may be getting likes for fractions of a cent, but these likes are not from what are called the ‘tier 1’ countries. Namely, the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

I want you to understand that it’s pretty much impossible to get one cent likes from tier 1 countries for only a penny. Unless you’re a conversion master, you’re targeting extremely specific, or you have some amazing secret, you’re not going to get likes from these countries for less than one cent. And if either of us could, we wouldn’t be here right now. We’d be making an unbelievable amount of money selling our tactics to advertising agencies and major companies.

To make things quick and easy for you, here are the countries I am currently targeting for my ad campaigns:

• Bangladesh
• Switzerland
• Germany
• Algeria
• Egypt
• Finland
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• Australia
• Indonesia
• India
• Italy
• Morocco
• Nigeria
• Netherlands
• Nepal
• Philippines
• Pakistan
• Romania
• Serbia
• Sweden
• Thailand
• Tunisia
• United States

Now you may have noticed that I do actually include a fiew tier 1 countries in that list, while the majority of the countries are tier 2 (Germany, Switzerland) and tier 3 (Bangladesh, Morocco, etc.) In all honesty, there’s no real reason not to. While you won’t get many likes from those countries with a CPC of one cent, perhaps there will be some time where Facebook had no other good advertisements to show and will display yours. After all, it’s not like there’s a penalty for adding that country, only a reward if your ad happens to come up for some reason.

Aren’t These Likes Worthless? Nope!

Some people make the mistake of completely ruling out likes from tier 3 countries, claiming they are completely worthless and even a penny per like is overpaying for them. I happen to disagree, and have some very good reasons for doing so.

First of all, people from these other countries are still people to deliver your message to. Despite having so many different countries listed here, my ads are only displayed to people speaking some variant of English. This means my message is understood, people know what to do if I ask them to do something, and if they happen to visit my website or buy something I’m offering, they’ll be able to actually use it.

Secondly, the price. I’ve actually gotten far more page likes from advertising than what is displayed in the picture above. This brings my average like to about 0.6 cents per like, not counting the likes I’ve gained organically through other sources.  This means I am getting ~167 likes per $1 on average. Let’s say the average U.S like is ~50 cents.

Would you rather have ~80 likes from tier 2 and tier 3 countries, or 1 like from the United States?

This will probably depend on what type of business you’re in. For example, likes from Serbia won’t do you any good if you’re promoting a page for a local business, or you only sell products to people located in the United States. Obviously, you’ll need to take a look at what your goal is with your Facebook page to determine what kind of people you need to target.

I sell digital products, which can be accessed and enjoyed by anyone, anywhere around the world. I also have a lot of content that I share for free here on James McAllister Online, and this will be obvious to someone clicking on my page for the first time. Somebody would be more likely to like my page when they see I’m not trying to sell them anything, therefore, my return per like is likely to be less as these people may not be genuinely interested in buying anything at this time. People love to say that quality is greater than quantity, but the truth is that your total return on investment is what matters the most. Simply screaming ‘quality is better than quantity’ is worthless because it depends on your unique situation. Your job is to find the right balance.

After advertising one of my courses on my page, the post had been exposed to 147 people, 3 people clicked on it, and 1 person bought it. While luck may have played a part, the $9 I made on that post alone was more than I had spent in total on advertising at that time.

Other Factors To Consider

People targeting tier 3 countries right now will have a competitive advantage in the future. To demonstrate this, let’s think about the world we live in for a moment. Throughout the past 20 and even just the last 5 years, internet access around the world has completely exploded. More people than ever are connected to the internet, and multiple people are connecting to the internet for the first time every second. Companies like Google and Facebook have plans to deliver internet to every person in the world for free. More and more people are incorporating the internet into their daily lives, and finally feeling comfortable shopping online.

Now you may be thinking, “that’s great, but that doesn’t mean people living in these countries have money to spend on our products.” That’s also partly true. Foreign exchange rates are for people living in tier 1 countries when buying, but against us when we’re selling. After all, I’ve never heard of a company based in India outsourcing its labor to United States workers. 😉

However, with access to the internet, this brings the opportunity for people living in these countries to make money similar to that which we’d be making in the U.S or U.K. Because the cost of living in terms of U.S. dollars is much, much lower, this also leaves these people with significantly more discretionary income to spend on products.

Finally, keep in mind that many countries are growing at a much faster rate than the United States and other upper-tier countries. India’s GDP growth rate in 2014 for example was 7.4%, significantly higher than the United States’ 2.4%. Later down the road this is going to result in much more money for people in tier 3 countries to spend, pushing advertising rates up further. You’d be foolish to think that page likes in these countries are always going to be as low as they are today.

Tier 1 Likes Are Still Available

You can still get likes from tier 1 countries using this strategy, it just won’t come from the advertisements themselves unless you want to pay higher prices.

Facebook is a large platform, and content can be shared around the world in a matter of seconds. When you start out, you may not have likes from the tier 1 countries, but chances are some of your fans will have family or friends that live there. Simply by having your followers share your content themselves, it may reach the tier 1 countries on its own without you paying anything at all. This will result in free organic likes over time. Best of all, this only grows exponentially as more and more people from tier 1 countries like your page.

Secondly, if you are advertising your page for free somewhere else (such as the sidebar of your website,) people are more likely to like your page when they see it already has a ton of likes from other people. Social proof is powerful, and this allows you to take advantage of it.

Getting $0.01 Page Likes On Facebook – My Strategy

Now that you know the countries I’m targeting, let’s get a bit more specific about how I’m actually getting likes. After all, we don’t just want anybody liking our page – we want people who are genuinely interested in what we have to offer.

Go Broad On Demographics When It Makes Sense

My page primarily covers entrepreneurship, with a focus on blogging because that’s what I know the most about. However, I offer also other entrepreneurship and finance related products in the form of courses. Therefore, I want to target people interested in those things as well.

Anyone can be an entrepreneur, so it’s very important that I go broad with my core demographics. If your business has some specific reason it needs to target a certain gender or age group, than obviously you should take note of that and target accordingly. For me, I’m targeting everyone that speaks English, even if they are under 18 and cannot actually spend money yet. They will grow up and one day have a way to buy stuff online, or they will pester their parents as I did for several years.

Go Narrow On Interests

Next you’ll have to target people based on their interests. Keep in mind that some of the targeting options will not be applicable to people living outside of the United States. I try to go quite specific with the interests I choose, but add a lot of them.

For example, this website primarily covers blogging, but there is a lot that goes into blogging. Therefore, I added things like ‘social media advertising,’ ‘search engine optimization,’ and ‘WordPress’ to my interests list.

Many bloggers are entrepreneurs, so I also added many interests related to that. I also recommend going outside the box even further – what else would a typical blogging entrepreneur like? I added everything from websites to television shows that I believe my target audience would be interested in.

In the end, this gave me a good set of people to target my advertisements to.

Eliminate Poorly Converting Advertisements

Set up multiple ad campaigns, and use all six different picture options that you’re allowed to use. After you have a good amount of data to work with, disable the advertisements that aren’t converting well and replace them with new variables.

Remember that Facebook is a business, and the goal of a business is to make money. Therefore, they are going to serve the advertisements that are going to make the most amount of money possible for them. This is especially true when you are paying per click rather than per impression. Facebook relies on people clicking on the advertisements. If an advertisement doesn’t get clicked on, Facebook does not get paid.

This means if you can get your advertisement to convert really well, Facebook will display it more often, even if you lower the price. Therefore, it may be worth the money to bid a little bit higher than 1 cent when initially starting to quickly determine what converts well, then lower the price to a penny when you have a good amount of data.

Use Images In Your Posts

Not only do images grab people’s attention better in their news feeds, they also spread your content further.

Whenever somebody likes or comments on a post with a picture in it, that action is pushed to all of their friend’s news feeds. I consider this to be free advertising, and one of the greatest ways to spread your content to people living in tier 1 countries.

Conclusion

If you’re willing to accept that you won’t be building a fully U.S audience on your Facebook page, than you now know everything you need to build a Facebook audience of real human people for under a penny per person.

I realize this is a huge topic, so if you have any questions or anything to add I’d love for you to share it using the comment form below.

I look forward to hearing what you have to say!