How to Make Money Using Facebook

Facebook isn't a secret money pile just waiting to be found, but it can be a reliable source of extra income with some work and a clever approach. Read the steps below to learn how to make money using Facebook.

Edit Steps

The Basics

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   Make great posts. The foundation of any successful plan to make money with social media is good content, and lots of it. On Facebook, that means a stream of interesting links, images, and updates every day.
   • Search for a niche and fill it with quality content. It doesn't have to be a niche nobody else is filling, but it should be specific enough that it's clear to the casual observer. For example, maybe you'll post content for cat lovers, mothers, or people with a certain political affiliation. If you plan to market a product with your account, be sure to link the product to your posts in some way.
   • Consider opening up another Facebook account and keeping it separate from your personal account. Use this account for your posts, and link them on your personal Facebook account to let people know about them. Depending on the approaches you use, you might even consider using multiple extra accounts.
   • Give it time. Let your account build up interest over time by continuing to provide fresh and relevant content every day.
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   Make a commitment to earn. The only way to reliably make money using Facebook is through persistent work. Like any job, setting a schedule and sticking to it is the key.
   • Organize. Whatever strategy you plan to pursue, you'll probably have to take care of several things every day to make it work for you. Plan out the order and times you'll do them in advance.
   • Saturate your market. Making money with Facebook is more of a numbers game than anything else. Since marketing on Facebook costs nothing except time, you can market as much as you want – even to a point that would be prohibitively expensive any other way – and let the percentages and statistics work their magic one penny at a time.
   • Add aggressively. One of the best ways to increase the number of people looking at your page is to simply add people as friends as often as you can. Most won't accept, but some will.

Making Money Through Affiliate Advertising

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   Find an affiliate program. Affiliate programs provide you with a unique ID and marketing materials, and then pay you a commission based on how much business you generate.
   • Most websites you've heard of offer such a program. Since there's no cost to the site for letting you do this, practically anybody can become an affiliate for as many sites as they want.
   • Start with well-known brands. Amazon offers a competitive affiliate program that pays a percentage of any purchase a person makes after clicking through from your post, even if it's not anything you advertised. Apple's iTunes program has an affiliate program as well.
   • Add in smaller programs. Though less likely to generate money on a given day, you can diversify and gradually increase your affiliate revenue by offering a wide range of advertising services to many different businesses.
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   Sign up. Once you've decided to market a company as an affiliate, search the company's site and fill out the required forms. This should always be free, and usually only takes a few minutes.
   • Don't ever pay to become an affiliate.
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   Add accounts. Make a Facebook account for each affiliate program or group of programs you sign up for. This allows people to follow your pages based on the things they're interested in, rather than having to sign up for one page full of all different kinds of ads.
   • As mentioned previously, you can use your primary account to repost things from the other accounts periodically, exposing those pages to the audience you've built.
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   Promote your programs. Make posts for each of them daily, and maintain your accounts fastidiously. With luck, and a good central account with a lot of followers, your affiliate accounts will begin to get followers as well. Whenever anyone clicks your posts and buys something from one of your affiliates, you earn money.

Making Money With an E-book

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   Write an e-book. E-books are just book-format publications that are distributed electronically, rather than printed on paper. Because there's basically no cost to publish an e-book, pretty much anybody with an idea can do it.
   • Take it easy on yourself. Unlike a paper-and-ink book, your e-book doesn't have to be any particular number of pages. In fact, most e-books that are written to generate income are more like e-pamphlets than whole books.
   • Choose a subject that will generate interest. Nonfiction is almost always a better choice than fiction. Oddly enough, e-books that tell people how to make money selling e-books are a popular option, and they apparently sell enough to at least offset the trouble of writing them.
   • Write in an area where you can claim some kind of authority. It'll add cachet to your book. You don't need to show credentials, but you should write about something you're better at than the average Joe.
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   Pick a publishing option. There are a few free ways to get your e-book published.
   • The most basic option is to save the book as a PDF file, and lock it with a password that you send to people who buy your book. Once the password is out there, anyone with the password can open the book.
   • Createspace is an Amazon.com service that allows you to publish e-books for free on the Amazon website. It offers better usage protection than the PDF method, but can't be directly distributed from anywhere other than Amazon's website. Createspace also has a number of paid services and options available. To maximize your Facebook profit, avoid using them.
   • ReaderWorks is a program that easily formats and published e-books in Microsoft Reader format, one of the most common e-book formats on the web. The Basic version of the program doesn't offer any security, but it's free and easy to learn. There's a paid version of ReaderWorks that adds digital rights management (DRM) protection. Only opt in for the paid version if you're going to be making a lot of books with it.
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   Get your e-book online. Createspace will post your book automatically. If you published it on your own computer, you can sell it a few different ways:
   • Amazon will let you upload and sell your e-book as a Kindle book for free. (Kindle is the brand name of Amazon's popular e-reader product line.) This option is called Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP.
     • On the plus side, KDP is fast and very flexible. You can publish your book in about 5 minutes, and set sale royalties for yourself as high as 70% (with Amazon taking the other 30%).
     • On the other hand, KDP does not publish your book for download outside of the Kindle marketplace. Readers who don't use Kindle won't be able to browse and purchase your book.
   • eBay will let you list items for sale at a set price. By offering a stock of “copies” of your e-book available for purchase on eBay, you can turn the venerable auction site into a de facto bookselling hub.
     • The advantage of eBay is its simplicity. Anyone with access to the site can potentially purchase a copy of your book – no special gadgets or software required.
     • The downside is the cost. eBay sets fees for just about everything; they only get worse when you set a fixed price point for purchases. Some of the fees are percentages, but others are flat, which can really bite into your profit margin if you're not careful.
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   Sell your e-book on Facebook. If you were wise and wrote a book that caters to the audience you've been building up with your primary account, you've got a receptive, ready-made audience for your sales pitch.
   • Advertise it several times a day, both blatantly and at the end of other posts. Be creative and try to engage your readers. Get them excited about reading your book.
   • If you have other accounts (such as affiliate accounts), advertise your book there, too.
   • Always provide a link for readers to click to visit the page where they can purchase your book.

Edit Tips

• There's no substitute for working hard. If you take time to cultivate and maintain a readership, the rest will take care of itself; on the other hand, if you just make a bunch of affiliate pages and sit back to wait for the money to roll in, you'll never succeed.
• E-books aren't the only thing you can sell to your fans, they're just one of the most likely things. Be creative and think about what else you might be able to make for little or no money that you could advertise to your readers.