Solved: Strategy for Earning Money on Facebook Content

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your plan to grow a Facebook page and make money from it. It's a common goal, but the path most people take is, frankly, a massive waste of time and money. The good news is there is a 'right path', it just doesn't involve the 'tricks' or 'hacks' you might be looking for.

The entire game has changed. Forget everything you think you know about 'going viral' or building a huge following organically. We need to reframe the entire problem. Your goal isn't to 'grow a page'; your goal is to build a predictable system for finding customers who will pay you money. The page is just one tool in the toolbox to achieve that. In this letter, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to think about this, build that system, and avoid the mistakes that cause 99% of people to give up.

We'll need to look at the real goal, not just 'growth'...

First things first, let's be brutally honest. The idea of starting a Facebook page today and growing it to thousands of engaged followers organically, who then magically turn into customers, is a fantasy. It might have been possible in 2012, but it's not anymore. Organic reach for business pages is practically zero. Facebook wants you to pay to reach people, and that's the reality we have to work with.

So, we need to completely shift our mindset. Stop thinking about "getting followers" and start thinking about "acquiring customers". The number of likes on your page is a vanity metric; it doesn't pay your bills. The only numbers that matter are leads, sales, and profit. Your Facebook page is not the business. It is a storefront, a billboard, and a platform from which you will run paid advertising campaigns. That is its primary, and frankly, only real function for a new venture looking to make money.

The competition you mentioned is real, but they're mostly all doing the same thing: posting content into the void and hoping for the best. They are wasting their time. You're going to be different because you're going to use the platform as it's intended to be used by businesses: as a paid acquisition channel. You're not trying to become a content creator; you're using content as a means to an end within a paid strategy. This is the single biggest "trick" there is: understanding the game you're actually playing.

You probably should forget about 'awareness' for now...

This leads to the next big myth I need to bust for you. When people first dip their toes into Facebook Ads, they see the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign objectives. They sound good, don't they? "I want people to be aware of my brand!" It makes logical sense on the surface. But doing this is the fastest way to burn through your money with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about these campaigns. When you tell the Facebook algorithm to get you 'awareness', you are giving it a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, in it's infinite wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It goes out and finds the users inside your targeting who are the least likely to ever click an ad, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those people's attention is cheap. No other advertisers want them, so Facebook can sell you their eyeballs for pennies.

You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It's madness, but people do it every single day. I've seen so many accounts where people have spent thousands on 'awareness' and have not generated a single lead or sale. It's a trap for beginners.

The best form of awareness is a happy customer. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales and having a great product, not a prerequisite for it. So what do you do instead? You run Conversion campaigns. Always. From day one. A conversion campaign tells the algorithm: "Don't just show my ad to anyone. Go and find people within my target audience who have a history of doing what I want them to do - whether that's filling out a lead form, buying a product, or booking an appointment."

The algorithm knows who the buyers are. It knows who the clickers are. It knows who the lurkers are. By optimising for conversions, you force the algorithm to work for you, to sift through millions of users and find the ones who will actually make you money. Yes, the cost per impression will be higher, but you're paying for quality, not quantity. This is non-negotiable if you dont want to waste your time.

I'd say your Ideal Customer is a nightmare, not a demographic...

So, we're going to run conversion ads. But who are we running them to? This is where most people go wrong again. They come up with a vague, sterile profile like "women aged 30-50 who like yoga and live in London." This is utterly useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic, ineffective advertising.

To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-or-life-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real.

• -> If you're selling fractional CFO services, your customer isn't "a small business owner." It's a founder who lies awake at 3 AM staring at the ceiling, terrified that they're going to miss payroll next month. Their nightmare is uncertainty and the fear of failure.
• -> If you're selling a project management SaaS tool, your customer isn't a "Head of Engineering". It's a leader who is terrified of her best developers quitting out of sheer frustration with a chaotic, broken workflow. Her nightmare is losing top talent and derailing the product roadmap.
• -> If you're selling handcrafted jewellery, your customer isn't "a woman who likes accessories." It's someone who is frustrated with mass-produced junk and is desperately searching for a unique piece that expresses her individuality, a piece that nobody else will have. Her nightmare is being generic.

You see the difference? We're not talking about demographics; we're talking about deep-seated emotional drivers. Once you've identified that core nightmare, everything else falls into place. Your ad copy, your offer, your targeting - it all flows from this one central insight.

So before you even think about what content to create, you must do this work. Sit down and write out a detailed description of the problem you solve. What is the 'before' state of your customer? What does their frustration feel like, look like, sound like? Get specific. Only then can you start thinking about how to reach them.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you understand your customer's nightmare, you can craft a message that hits them right between the eyes. Your ad needs to feel like you've been reading their diary. It needs to articulate their problem better than they could themselves. This is how you cut through the noise and competition.

Forget listing features. Nobody cares about your product's features. They care about what it does for them. They care about the transformation. Here are a couple of powerful frameworks we use to structure ad copy that actually works.

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)

This is perfect for services or products that solve a painful problem. You state the problem, you pour salt on the wound by agitating it, and then you present your solution as the relief.

Example for the fractional CFO:

Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB)

This is great for showing a clear transformation. You paint a picture of their current frustrating reality (Before), show them the dream destination (After), and then position your product as the bridge to get them there.

Example for a B2B SaaS product:

Before: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated."
Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

I've put these in a simple table to make them clearer:

This is what "making content" should mean for you. Not random posts, but carefully crafted ads that speak directly to a person's problems and offer a clear path to a solution.

We'll need to look at how to actually find these people...

Okay, so you have your conversion-focused campaign objective and your pain-aware ad copy. Now, how do you put that ad in front of the right people? This is targeting, and it's where understanding your customer's 'nightmare' pays off again.

When you're starting a new ad account with no data, you'll begin with Detailed Targeting. This means targeting people based on the interests, behaviours, and demographics they've shown on the platform. The key here is to avoid the obvious, broad interests that everyone else is targeting. You need to think like your customer.

Let's go back to the Head of Engineering who's afraid of her developers quitting. What interests would she have?

• -> She probably doesn't have "Engineering" listed as an interest. That's too broad.
• -> But she might follow specific tech leaders like Jason Lemkin on Twitter (whose audience you can sometimes target).
• -> She might listen to niche tech podcasts like 'Acquired'.
• -> She almost certainly uses other SaaS tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Jira. You can often target users of these platforms.
• -> She might be a member of specific Facebook groups like 'SaaS Growth Hacks'.

This intelligence is the blueprint for your targeting. You're looking for proxies for their pain. Instead of targeting "small business owners," you target people who are administrators of a Facebook Business Page AND have an interest in "Shopify" or "WooCommerce." Now you're getting much, much closer to an actual ecommerce store owner.

As an agency, we have a clear prioritisation for audiences. For a new account like yours, it would look something like this:

Phase 1: Cold Traffic (Top of Funnel - ToFu)

Your entire focus is here to begin with. You'll create different ad sets, each testing a different 'theme' of interests. One ad set might target competitors. Another might target software they use. A third might target industry publications or influencers. You run them against each other and see which one delivers conversions at the best cost. You turn off the losers and give more budget to the winners. It's a process of constant experimentation.

Phase 2: Warm & Hot Traffic (Middle & Bottom of Funnel - MoFu/BoFu)

Once you've driven some traffic to your website (because you're running conversion ads, remember?), you can start retargeting. This is where the real money is often made. You can create audiences of:

• -> All website visitors in the last 30 days.
• -> People who visited a specific product page but didn't buy.
• -> People who added an item to their cart but didn't complete the purchase.

You then show these people different ads, maybe with a testimonial, a special offer, or a reminder of the benefits, to bring them back and close the sale. The performance of these retargeting audiences is almost always better than cold traffic.

Phase 3: Lookalike Audiences

Once you have enough data (at least 100 purchases or leads, but ideally more), you can unleash Facebook's most powerful tool: Lookalike Audiences. You can tell Facebook, "Here is a list of my last 500 customers. Go and find me one million other people in the UK who look and behave exactly like them." The algorithm is scarily good at this. A lookalike of your best customers is often the most profitable audience you will ever have.

But you can't skip the steps. You have to start with disciplined interest targeting to gather the data needed to build your retargeting and lookalike audiences. It's a methodical process, not a lottery.

You'll need to work out what a customer is actually worth...

This is a more advanced concept, but if you grasp it, you'll be ahead of 95% of your competition. The question isn't "How cheap can I get a lead?" The real question is "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a great customer?" The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Let's run through a simple example. Let's imagine you're selling a subscription service. You'll need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average customer worth to you each month? Let's say it's £100.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit on that revenue? Let's say it's 70%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's say it's 5%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

In this example, every new customer you acquire is worth £1,400 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy business might aim for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,400 / 3 = ~£466 to acquire a single customer and still run a very profitable business.

Suddenly, paying £20, £50, or even £100 for a qualified lead from a Facebook ad doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of trying to get the cheapest possible clicks and allows you to focus on acquiring the highest value customers. Without knowing this number, you're flying blind.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. It's a far cry from "post 3 times a day and use the right hashtags." But this is the professional approach. This is how you build a real business using Facebook, rather than just having a hobby. Here's a summary of the key strategic shifts you need to make.

Following this framework is the 'right path' you're looking for. It's not a secret trick; it's a professional strategy. It requires discipline, testing, and a willingness to treat this like a science, not an art.

As you can probably tell, this is more complex than just boosting a post. It's about building a robust marketing funnel, constantly analysing data, split-testing creatives, and optimising campaigns. We've helped numerous businesses navigate this, from reducing a SaaS company's Cost Per Acquisition from £100 down to just £7, to generating over 45,000 signups for an app, to helping an ecommerce brand achieve a 1000% Return On Ad Spend. It's possible, but it takes expertise.

The path I've outlined above is your blueprint. You can absolutely take it and start implementing it yourself. But if you feel it's a bit overwhelming and you'd rather have an expert guide you through it, saving you from making costly mistakes, then that's what we're here for.

We offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy consultation where we can talk through your specific business and goals. We can help you define that 'nightmare' ICP, brainstorm some initial targeting ideas, and give you a clearer picture of what a successful campaign could look like for you. It's a great way to get a taste of the expertise you'd get if we were to work together.

Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh