Social Media Platforms For Promoting Your Product
One of the best ways to help generate traffic for your blog and promote your post and product is Social Media. Social Media is a powerful tool to reach potential customers and start to make money for free online. Establish a presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Use engaging content (write as though you care), eye-catching visuals (Such as pretty happy ladies working), and strategic hashtags (words that are relevant to your topic) to attract followers and direct them to your eBay listings or Gumtree ads or your Blog.
The method is very straightforward. Post your product from eBay, Gumtree or your posts from your blog, directly to your preferred social media free listing and as your following grows people click through to look at it.
Now some may say that a post is the least effective of these but I am telling you it is by far the most effective. Sure it is the most indirect because the potential customer has to click on the post before they see your ad, but if your posted article is well-written then you are effectively preselling. No article should be a sales page. Unless you have a particularly popular product that will turn more people away than get them to buy. It should just be well written on a relevant topic and let your ad do the selling.
A Selection of Useful Social Media:
You can promote your product on social media for free. You can even build a shop on some of them. Thus avoiding, at least initially, the need to have a shopping cart.
Facebook Business Page:
I will discuss business registration in another post. But once you are registered you should register as a business. Being a business on Facebook gives you access to a lot of extra tools.
Facebook marketplace:
You can sell dropshipping products in the Facebook marketplace (there will be a link to it from the side menu of your Facebook page).
Facebook shop:
You can also set up a Facebook shop. This is very easy through ECWID or you can do it yourself. At the time of writing this, you are not allowed to do paid advertising to sell digital products on a Facebook shop though from what I have read that is set to change. There are ways around this but as we are not planning on paid advertising yet in kind of does not matter. But I will discuss it in another post because as we have foreshadowed there are ways to get money for advertising. In the meantime, you can promote digital products in the news feed of your Facebook page. Just put links on your products that lead straight to your sales page
But this is going to be hard work. You must keep in mind that social media exists to make money. Everything is designed to convince you to advertise with them. This is true of every platform.
Join Groups
You are going to have to join groups to make sure your profile is up to date and done in such a way that if someone clicks to see who you are they are led to someone who is interesting and just happens to have a product to sell. Please do this only to groups you are genuinely interested in. You will get banned or just ignored if you’re not.
From those groups, people will get to know you and will over time, usually it’s a very long time, become interested in connecting with your page. You cannot sell directly this way. You will get ignored or banned.
Then you are going to search out stories and share those with your interest group.
In short, you are going to do everything you can, through active participation and consistent, regular posting of interesting stories and making comments, to get people to your page. You will need to “friend” lots of people and ask them to join your page. Here again, you have to make sure that there is some sort of genuine connection with people and you cannot, I repeat you cannot do it quickly. I recommend only one every couple of days. Facebook will ban you if you try to friend lots of people all at once. And if you friend people randomly that have no relationship or mutual interests that will also get you banned.
Notifications
Here is a tip. Make sure you check your inbox and your notifications. If you click on all your “Likes” through the notifications link you will be given the option to invite all those people to like your page. This will help your traffic.
This does work but it takes a very, very, very long time to get people to your page. But it is free and if you need your traffic to be completely free you will have to put in the work.
Instagram:
Instagram can get you lots of followers. If you have a Facebook business account you can access it through that. You should also try and get registered with Instagram as a business, this will give you access to a bunch more tools.
The big difference between Facebook and Instagram is that Instagram is far more oriented to images and pictures. This is ideal for physical products but is a little harder for digital ones.
However the principle is the same, you have to do everything you can, through active participation and consistent, regular posting of interesting stories and making comments, to get people to your page.
In terms of promotion, however, Instagram does one thing very different to Facebook. You can get people to like your page and that is “influences”. If you have a product that is sufficiently interesting or unique you may be able to send it to an “influencer” and get them to promote it. This will bring traffic to your page.
Just be aware that Influencers are only going to be interested if there is some gain to them. Your product has to be interesting or unique enough to be able to get them on board.
Also, although there are some business tools that allow you to get links directly to your product image, for the most part, people understand that if they want to buy your product through Instagram they are going to have to go to your profile.
LinkedIn:
Generally for businesses. The concept of business is very broad. For example, I post stories about Martial Arts and swimming.
If you are going to post to LinkedIn you have to be professional if you are going to get free traffic however or you will be ignored. You cannot get away with direct selling unless you are doing a paid ad.
Pinterest:
This used to be pretty much a ladies-only domain but that has changed in terms of getting free traffic it is the same as all the other social media, you have to do everything you can, through active participation and consistent, regular posting of interesting stories and making comments, to get people to your page.
Tic Tok:
As with all other social media with video, you have to do everything you can, through active participation and consistent, regular posting of interesting stories and making comments, to get people to your page.
I hope I do not need to cover all the social media for you to get the point. All social media is the same, after all, that is why it is called social media. Because it is social.
Steep Learning Curves
All social media platforms require you to learn how to use them. I am not going to attempt to cover how to use each of them here. There are plenty of guides and videos online on how to use each of them.
Here again, you have to be prepared to put in the hard work and learn how to use each properly. There are plenty of gurus out there that will try to tell you it is easy and you can make 6,7 or more figures for free, without breaking a sweat. Don’t believe them! They are only telling you this in order to get you to buy their course. Only when you have bought their course do they tell you how much hard work is involved.
I am not saying that you can’t do very well on each of these platforms. You can, it’s just lots of work no matter what you do.
Specialise
My advice is that you take on just one of these social media platforms and get good at it. No matter how much hard work you are prepared to do you can spread yourself too thin. If you split your time you reduce your capacity to earn. Be a specialist, not a generalist. Specialists make money generalists do not.
Next: A Website: Do I Need One To Make Money For Free Online Part 7
