Check out and get your tickets for Freelancer Remote Conf!

 

02:59 - Mojca Marš

04:02 - As freelancers, why do (should) we care about Facebook?

06:22 - Where do you start? How often should you post?

09:18 - Who is going to see my page if I don’t advertise it? 

11:41 - Who is going to see my new content?

12:52 - Growing a Community (Facebook Page) vs Growing Your Mailing List

16:07 - Why are people on Facebook? Who is on Facebook?

19:39 - What should I post? How do I post without being salesy?

25:38 - What kind of page should I make?

31:25 - Should all businesses advertise on Facebook?

35:24 - Building Trust with Users

37:41 - Involving Your Audience

39:11 - Building a Community and then Marketing to that Community

42:30 - Experimentation and Testing

Picks

CodeMonkey (Reuven)
Sriracha Ketchup (Jonathan)
The Independent Consulting Manual: An Insider’s Guide to Building Six-Figure Solo Consultancies (Philip)
All Remote Confs (Chuck)
Freelancer Remote Conf (Chuck)
Clash of Clans (Chuck)
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg (Mojca)
Spark (Mojca)
Staples Easy Button (Mojca)
Dinosaur Onesie (Mojca)

 

Well, should we do a podcast? I’m going to ask all my dumb questions.

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 181 of The Freelancers’ Show. This week on our panel we have Philip Morgan.

Hey hey.

Jonathan Stark.

Hello.

Reuven Lerner.

Hi everyone.

I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. I guess this is the right time to announce that I’m going to be putting on a freelancing remote conference. So go check that out at freelanceremoteconf.com. I’m going to invite all the folks on this call to come speak, and we’ll see how that goes.

We also have a special guest this week, and I already forgot how to say her name.

[Chuckles] It’s Mojca.

Mojca. That’s right [chuckles]. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Sure. Thank you for having me, first of all. I’m Mojca. I’m from Slovenia, actually, and I’m a social media consultant.

Awesome. Freelancers Show, Slovenian edition.

Yeah. I think I’m probably the first Slovenian you have [chuckles].

Yeah, I think so. That’s a safe bet. So you're a social media consultant. We brought you on to talk about Facebook.

Mm-hm. So I actually run a small consulting firm called Super Spicy Media and I started out – we sat – I should mention that I got fired from my job, and that’s not a joke. So that actually happened [chuckles], and I got fired from an advertising agency I was working at and I just had to build my business up from there on, and here I am today speaking to you.

Very cool. So you got fired because that whole social media thing’s a dud?

Yep. They said that Facebook – well, not just Facebook – Facebook, Twitter and everything is going to hell. And to be honest, they had clients knocking on their doors saying ‘I want a social media manager. I want to do social media’, but they weren’t buying it. They were telling no and that ‘no, social media is not going to last. Facebook will be done in a few years’ time’ – a few months’ time, actually. So I was actually really pushing to do social media, but they weren’t for it, so yeah [chuckles].

Yeah, just a fad.

Yup, yup. We can see that now, just Facebook is – tomorrow, gone, puff.

That’s right. So as freelancers, why do we care about Facebook?

Because your audience is there and you can reach your audience with Facebook if you do the right things. I’m actually a freelancer, so to speak, and I’ve done great things with Facebook and I don’t know why not many freelancers are doing it. I think Brennan is actually a great example of what can be done with Facebook. He has this Facebook page which is not looking great, to be honest [chuckles], but he – I’m just going to be honest here, you know.

Brennan, fix your ugly page.

Brennan, fix your Facebook page and you know who to call if you need help [chuckles]. But yeah, he’s done great things with Facebook ads, actually, but yeah, he should work on his Facebook page presence, if you ask me.

Well, maybe we should just turn this into the ‘What Brennan should do to make things better’ show [chuckles].

Everything [laughter].

I definitely have some questions here, too. I mean, I’m doing these online conferences and I've been looking at Facebook as a way to promote them, so yeah. I've got a few saved up; I was like ‘ooh, we got a Facebook person on here’ [chuckles]. Because I get on Facebook when one of my clients pays me to write code against Facebook.

Uh huh.

I just like that Brennan has got share status now. We don’t even need to use his last name.

That’s right.

He’s doing something right.

The Brennan.

Right. Madonna.

But he has his last name on his Facebook page, so he’s still Brennan Dunn.

So I’m aware that Brennan and several other folks, including us actually, have a community page on Facebook. Is that the place you want to go for first, or do you want to buy advertising, or do you want a page for people to like, or –?

You shouldn’t go into advertising without having a Facebook page because you have more options to choose from if you have a Facebook page first then do advertising. So that’s the first point I want to make. But yeah, first, I think the most important part is building a community and having a great Facebook page presence because if you run some advertising on Facebook and then people come to your page through that ads and see that your Facebook page is just shitty, I mean bye-bye authority [chuckles], see you later.

So I think you should first have a great Facebook page, and that doesn’t mean having thousands of likes, but just posting great content on a Facebook page, and then doing advertising.

So how would anyone approach that? You look at the page and you have a nice image on it, and then you post stuff to it regularly is what I’m hearing from you; how regularly should you post?

I think at least 5 times a week.

Wow.

Oh my god.

That’s like –.

I’m going to have to get way more creative.

[Inaudible] in social media. Wow.

I was thinking you're going to say ‘oh, 5 times a week, no problem’ [chuckles]. I mean it’s not a problem if you look at it from another perspective. Let’s say you post one long blog post per 14 days. So you can create so much content from that one blog post and then share it on Facebook, like just knowledgeable bits on your Facebook page, bam!, you have a content. It’s not like you're sitting down behind a computer, don’t know what to write about, but you have a content from your blog post maybe, so just sharing that value on your Facebook page.

So you're talking about a link to a blog post or the actual content?

The actual content. Links are just one thing, but I think that Facebook page should act like a separate channel not just for you to post links to your blog post, but just you share value not linking to your blog post so when people come to your Facebook page, they get the value from the Facebook page and they don’t need to click on the link to get to your blog.

Yeah. That makes sense to me especially given how many people are on mobile and popping out and popping back. It’s not always a great experience.

Yeah because if you have another link that you want people to send to, that’s always one click away. So you want to post some value on your Facebook page without forcing people to click on the link and to see that value on your webpage.

Ok, so let’s say now I've set up, thanks to you and your book, I've [inaudible] and making the mistake of not having Facebook – [crosstalk].

Wait, wait, wait. There's a book?

Oh there's a book. She wrote a book. It’s great, but we’ll talk about it some other time.9

Ok. I’ll tell you when you're older. I get it.

So I made the mistake a number of months ago of trying to get advertising to a few sites that I do, so I went into these Facebook ads, then I realized, thanks to your book and even some conversations we had, that I need to set up a page. Fine, but – and posting that page on a regular basis, I can see as ‘ok, that’s going to bring some value’. But who is going to see that page if I’m not paying for advertising? How are people going to see it? Is it based on the demographic that I tell Facebook about when I first set up the page? Are they really going to show it to people?

Well, actually not, but what you can do is what really made the change for me was I linked to my Facebook page several times, first of all, on my webpage and I got many likes from my webpage because people wanted to see more; more of what I have to offer because I post some content on my Facebook page that I don’t post anywhere else. So that was my call-to action. I said ‘here’s my Facebook page’. I post – I don’t know – maybe some quotes or personal stories or whatever on my Facebook page that you're not going to see elsewhere. So you should like my Facebook page, blah blah blah blah blah, and that was, I think, a really great value to give to my fans.

So then, it just started to grow because people were sharing my content and referring to other people to my Facebook page, and suddenly, other Facebook pages could tag my Facebook page in their mentions, so that was another way to grow my audience even more because pages can – Facebook has this nasty bug so you can’t tag – sometimes you can tag people in your Facebook – in your post that you post with a Facebook page, but sometimes – the majority of times, you can’t tag people, but you can tag pages. So right now when a podcast has a Facebook page, they can tag my own personal Facebook page – not profile, but page – and just expand my audience a little bit more.

Ok. Fine, fine. All that makes sense, although the notion of having yet another place where I have to put original content is a little daunting. But let’s assume that I do it; let’s assume I put some content there, I put some – get some links and so forth and likes, when I then post new content to my Facebook page, who is going to see it? Is it people who have liked it? Are they going to then get a notice in their wall? How does that work? How do people know that there's going to be new content?

People are going to see that in their News Feed. So in their Timeline, their Facebook Timeline – first of all, more people are going to see it in the beginning because Facebook algorithm then won’t serve it – for example, if you have a thousand Facebook likes, there aren’t going to be a thousand people that are going to see that Facebook post. So Facebook algorithm is only going to show it to a section or a portion of that audience, and then based on that engagement that you're going to get from that post, so if your post is going to be interesting to people, if people are going to get engaged with it, Facebook is going to show it to more of your fans, but if not, waa waaa [chuckles].

That’s it. So the more interesting content you have, the more people engaged with the content, the higher chance of reaching a wider audience you have. And yeah, that’s about it.

To follow on to Reuven’s inherent fear of like ‘geez, now this is another place I have to post content’, and I share that. It’s not a fear, but it’s like ‘geez, do I really have enough time of the day to do that too’, but it’s not just that. It’s also a new inbox because if you're – I think if you're doing social right, you're actually interacting with people who are commenting and sharing and you're thanking people and it’s not – it’s like another email inbox so it’s – obviously, you think it’s worth it, and is there something you can say to quell that fear that people might be having about like ‘geez, I don’t think I have time to do Facebook right’.

Well, the fear of having another inbox, I think it’s unnecessary because isn't that like a sweet worry you have? Because when I have a full inbox, I know that I've got a of work to do because I have to reply to all of those messages and everything, but that’s my audience; that’s my audience who wants to engage with me, the audience that is going to be prepared to buy something for me in the future if I give them any device or help them with anything. So I’m actually pretty happy when that happens.

And the second thing about just having another channel to post on, I think it’s not that big of a deal if you look at it from the perspective with that I described earlier. So it’s like maybe an extension of your blogs. So you can take the content from your blogs, just maybe shorten it a little bit and don’t just post the whole blog post on there, but just maybe one – I don’t know – a few lines, create an image with – I don’t know – Canva is a great tool for creating images for social media – and just post that on Facebook page. If you have the time, yes, go create totally new content that you don’t share anywhere else. But if you don’t have the time, nothing’s wrong with just sharing maybe some bits of knowledge from your blog post, maybe.

So the other thing that I’m seeing here is that it feels a little bit like growing your, I guess, your community around a page similar to the way that you're encouraged to grow your mailing list? Do you think about it the same way or should you be growing your mailing list first because that’s more lucrative or more – I don’t know – the engagement is different?

I think growing your email list is important; there's no doubt about that. And Facebook likes, you don’t get emails with Facebook likes, so you're strapped to Facebook. But I do think that liking a page is easier than having people to subscribe to your email list, so liking a page could be the first step that you make towards getting new subscribers later on if you post great content on your Facebook page.

I think email lists and Facebook page likes are two totally different things, but – that should be taken differently, but I think, like I said, getting people to like your Facebook page is going to be easier for you than getting them subscribe to your email list. So I think that could use as the first step in an engagement that you have with your audience; just getting that Facebook page like, communicating with them, and then later showing them the path to your email list and getting them to subscribe.

This is going to sound like such a dumb question [chuckles] like a social media dummy. From the user’s perspective, do people go to Facebook for anything in particular? What's their intent when they're there? Is that different than Twitter? How do you see that?

When people go on Facebook, just in general when they visit Facebook.com or –?

Yeah, why are they there, and does that affect how someone would use Facebook or Facebook advertising?

Sure. When people go to Facebook, they usually go there to interact with the friends they have, so that’s usually family or maybe co-workers or anything like that. I always emphasize that people don’t go to Facebook to watch ads, so you shouldn’t be too promotional. Instead, if you want to achieve great results such as conversions or growing audience, you have to blend in with the updates people are seeing on Facebook; so that’s blending in with updates from their friends, not sharing promotional content, but just acting like a human being, so personalizing and humanizing your brand so it blends in with the audience and with the updates they are seeing in their News Feeds.

So I think that it plays a major role when it comes to being effective with Facebook advertising because people think that other users go to Facebook to watch ads, so they act like it, but they don’t. They go to Facebook – when I was at Facebook, I want to see updates from my sisters, maybe, my mom – my mom’s on Facebook – and I’m happy when I see that. And if I see an ad that blends in with that and maybe offers me some value or anything, sure no problem, but if I see an ad that goes Sale Sale Sale, blah blah blah blah blah, no, you're out of there. So I think that’s a major point people don’t really understand when it comes to Facebook advertising, and I think there should be more talk about that.

Yeah, that makes sense. One of the other thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is it seems like you – there's a mindset difference where the people who are using Facebook the way you describe works well think of their – do they think of their lives as an open book? Are they sharing personal stuff intermixed with little value bombs in terms of content? How do they handle themselves on Facebook?

I personally – what I found out it works best is, like you said, mixing that value with personal content because let’s face it, Facebook is personal. So actually, to be honest, the best engagement I get is from sharing personal posts, so that maybe – I don’t know – this is going to [inaudible] to say, but selfies are a major thing. They play a big role in my Facebook marketing, if you say so. And just sharing personal stories with big quotes, describing my struggles or anything like that, that’s the best tactic that I've used this year and I see that happening over and over again. I see Gary Vaynerchuk doing that, just sharing some personal things about himself through Facebook, and I think that plays a major role, and I mean, we’re talking about freelancers here. Freelancers are usually the face of the business, so the more personal they get on Facebook, the better it is. Not just sharing blog posts – sharing blog posts is important, sharing value is important, but I think the personal things should be mixed in with that content.

Interesting. So let’s say that I've never done that; I’m terrified of it, [inaudible] imagine.

Normally, yeah.

Ok, so what should be my first personal thing? Where should I start?

I think a good way to start is maybe sharing your personal story how you came to the point where you're at now. I did that several times. I share a little tiny bits over and over again, and that – you get down on another level and you're not high above and people don’t – you are another authority, but you're a human being and you're communicating that. And I think that plays a vital role in Facebook marketing and just sharing the content that you have to provide. So I think sharing how you came to the point that you're at now is just a great step in the right direction.

Very cool.

[Inaudible] to point out about that that’s been my experience even before Facebook is that if you act like yourself all the time, even with customers, even if you don’t think it’s professional or whatever that means – a classic example is like ‘do I swear in blog posts or don’t I?’ That’s a big example, but there's a million things. How much do you let your personality and your actual person come out?

And my experience is that what ends up happening if you do that is you end up – customer – end up attracting customers who you totally get along with because they just grow on your personality. They can tell they're going to like you. And for me, it was mostly speaking gigs. I get up in front of the room for a couple of hundred people and I just totally be myself. I wouldn’t try and be special speaker version of me and it feels like whenever I've been in situations where – I can think of one in particular where I was subcontracting for an agency and they were much more buttoned down than I was, and it didn’t work. The clients that they pulled in were horrible. I couldn’t stand them.

So if people are listening and they're thinking ‘oh’, especially if they're solo freelancer or solo consultant, they're thinking ‘oh geez, I need to act bigger than I am or pretend like I’m a big agency or something and act professional’. I don’t think it’s a good idea because you'll end up with customers who are expecting you to be that way all the time and you're not really like that.

So to make it personal, would baby pictures be a good thing to post?

Well, if you're personality – if you're personal brand is baby pictures, then sure, go for it [chuckles]. [Crosstalk]

Or if you recently had a baby, or if your wife recently had a baby?

Sure [chuckles]. Why not?

Just throwing it out there in case somebody’s in that position. You're saying to post 4 or 5 times a week. Let’s say that I actually do get things together to post 4 or 5 times a week. How do I work in the ‘hey, by the way, I have this thing that I think will help you that you can buy from me’?

Well, first of all, I would try to build up on that a little bit. How I did it with my book is I have been posting pictures of my desk, which was a mess, and I was just telling them ‘here’s my creative mess. I’m writing a book. Here’s [inaudible], blah blah blah’ so people will – people knew that I’m doing – I’m working on something; I’m doing something, and that was the first step. So I was actually building up on that and just sharing tiny bits from my book, maybe I think I shared a screenshot once, and I was just communicating with people, posting my pre-sales page up, and then when the book was available, I announced it and I got purchases from it.

So I think it’s not like – you should create value, but you shouldn’t just then one day appear and say ‘hey, here’s what I’m offering. Here’s the link, go to it’. You should build up on that and be honest because people will notice if you share value just for the sake of sharing value, and then just posting something out there ‘here’s – you need to buy this right now’. I think you should be totally honest and communicate with people like you would communicate with your friends and maybe announcing your product in a friendly way, maybe telling a personal story behind it like ‘I was working on a book for X, Y, Z hours or X, Y, Z days, months, whatever. Here it is, check it out, let me know what you think’. So I would just say communicate with your audience like you would communicate with your friends. I think that’s the biggest takeaway I took when I was promoting my book, for example.

That’s awesome. I like that.

Yeah. I think people take Facebook marketing as this big monster and they are not aware that it’s just a bunch of people on Facebook. They're not judging every step you take. You have to be friendly. You have to blend in with that and not take it like as that big intimidating monster that you're not going to tackle in your lifetime.

So you would say that the first step is to set up a page and is that page – would you – in your case, is that page for your business or was it for your blog or is that the same thing?’

I’ll just give you an idea of where I’m coming from. I've dabbled in some Facebook stuff and considering how little effort I've put into it, I've been impressed with the level of engagement and so I really believe that putting some level of effort into it would be very beneficial. So in my case, it was for a labor of love podcast that I do the cohost and we didn’t want to have a big site for it; we basically just had almost like a landing page for the podcast, and it pushed everyone to this Facebook page for it. And we don’t really have a called action. We don’t have a – there's no conversion, really. We’re just interested in getting more people listening to the podcast. I guess what I’m trying to say is should – I set up a specific page that’s like the title of the podcast, but should I have done – like people do pages for themselves, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think it depends on what goal you have with your Facebook page. So if you want to just promote your podcast, then sure, your approach is totally fine and I support it 100%. But what people are doing, and especially like solo consultants like, again, Brennan Dunn, is just creating a page for themselves, for their personal brand. So Brennan Dunn isn't ‘Double Your Freelancing Rate’ or whatever, he’s Brennan Dunn on Facebook. I personally regret a little bit not setting up Mojca Mars or anything on Facebook so I have Super Spicy Media. But I don’t have my logo as a profile picture. I have my face. So that’s actually an extension of my personal brand and I take all of that communication as well.

And yeah, I think if you are a solo consultant, if you are a freelancer, sure, make a personal branding Facebook page, may that be the name of your business like Super Spice Media in my case, or your name like Brennan Dunn or Gary Vaynerchuk is another example, but if you have a goal for just promoting your podcast that you cohost with another person, then setting up a Facebook page separately for that podcast is a way to go. So again, it all depends on the number one goal you have with your Facebook page.

Cool. So once you have the page, if that’s the first step, you decide to set it up one way or the other, then I've noticed that there are these – I've experimented with these – Facebook gives you these ‘promote this post’ buttons and they totally work. So like if – well, at least – the analytics that Facebook gives you back in the case that they're doing something, but it’s difficult for me to have some kind of sense of the ultimate outcome if this was some kind of business; or let’s say we sold t-shirts for the podcast or something. On the one hand, it’s like ‘ok, we are getting more engagement than we did before we had the Facebook page’. It’s night and day, in fact. Now we can have – because with a podcast, it’s difficult to have a conversation with the audience. So that’s where it happens for us; it happens on the Facebook page.

But what's the goal – I promote the post, great, I got more likes. But what is that – it works; it gets you more like as it promises, but what is that gain in the long run? So if the podcast was more business oriented, I've got this audience of people – I guess what I’m asking is what's the next step after that? Is it driving people to sign up for my email list or something or –?

Yeah. Is it part of a funnel, or is it –?

Right.

Yeah. I think it should act as a part of the funnel. Like I mentioned before, in my case it’s like the first step for users or my fans to get to know me a little bit more. And then after sharing some value, maybe pointing them out to my blog post where there's a subscription box and just getting them sign up as a subscriber. That’s fine and it’s all part of the funnel.

But yeah, I get that the ROI, the long term ROI is very, very hard to measure with social media when it comes to social media because everyone’s saying that social media is a marathon, not a sprint. So if you want to just measure the whole ROI, you're going to have a tough job. You can measure the ROI of your advertising, sure, but the long term ROI of your content of your Facebook page and Twitter or whatever, that’s hard to measure. I totally understand that. But I think it should be the part of the funnel.

Usually, social media is usually neglected just because the ROI can’t be measured precisely, but I think it shouldn’t be neglected, like I mentioned, because it is a part of the funnel. It’s that first step because liking a Facebook page is easy; getting them to subscribe to your email list is a bit harder, but if you made that first step and then engage with them on the longer run, why not?

That’s how it seems to me is that it’s the steps – it’s like if you think about blogging or your website, pretty much the easiest called action that you can present to people is to join my mailing list. It’s like ‘I will send you a bunch of awesome emails if you give me your email address so I can talk to you’. And Facebook is clearly even less friction than that. So for me, it feels like it probably goes in front of that.

But it gives you – there's something – it’s different though. Obviously, it’s two different things, but I almost feel like it’s a place – like when you send an email to your list, you – I always ask for ‘if you have questions, hit reply and we can chat about it’, but it turns into a one-on-one conversation instantly. So I send out a broad – basically, a broadcast – not really a broadcast, but an email goes out to a bunch of people and then a bunch of one-on-one conversations might ensue out of that over email.

do you think that there are businesses where it really, really doesn’t make sense to have this be part of your funnel, or do you think that it’s applicable to all businesses?

To be honest, I haven’t met a business that wouldn’t have the chance to use Facebook to their true potential. I've had lots of businesses coming to me asking for my advice, but I haven’t met a business that I would say ‘no, Facebook is not for you, go away’ [chuckles], to be honest. I just I haven’t met them.

I suppose if they're going to do it wrong, it would be bad for them.

Well, yeah, yeah, sure [chuckles].

Let me actually then try to distinguish between these things. So I think having a Facebook page seems like a really smart thing for just by every business to do, and in a small part because it’s free. You can post to a people, [inaudible] people engage with it, but then comes advertising.

Would you say that all businesses can benefit from advertising on Facebook also?

I think some businesses can benefit more than other businesses. This is going to be my answer. I think –.

Oh, she is a freelancer. ‘It depends’. [Laughter]

I think the vast majority of businesses can benefit from Facebook advertising, but naturally, some will benefit more than other businesses. That’s my answer. It depends. [Laughter]

Excellent. I give that to other people so it’s only fair to get it back from you. So let me try then like a [inaudible] in a little bit. And it might just be that my ads were terrible, but I found that I was advertising a book that I wrote. And I [inaudible] actually because it was two books that I wrote to wildly different audiences, and I got a lot of likes. People were like ‘oh, wow, what a great book’, thanks to the advertising. But actual number of people who went to the site and looked into it was ridiculously small.

And it gave me the sense that – two possibilities; one is that my ads just stink, but the other one is that people on Facebook are used to liking things but not necessarily clicking through and seeing more things. And so it gave me a sense of ‘well, I guess this could work, but is the investment’ – the number of times they might have to see my page and engage with it and see content, and I’ll have to pay for advertising and so forth, that might just not be worth the expense at this point.

I think your number one problem was audience. What was the audience you were targeting? So when I was advertising my book, I was targeting my own audience. I was targeting my own email list. So I naturally had a higher – a high ROI, and because I was advertising to my audience, I was advertising to people that already know me. I had that trust established. But if you are advertising to a bunch of people that’s the first time seeing you, and you are telling them ‘hey, here’s the book, go buy it’, I don’t think you're in it for a good ride because that’s the first engagement they have with you. So naturally, liking post is easy; it’s just one click away. Buy buying your book, that’s a hard thing to sell on the first take.

So I think you should first establish trust with the audience that does know you if you are advertising the audience that doesn’t know you, but I think the best step to take here is to advertise to your own audience that already knows you so you have that trust established. You don’t need to build that from the start, but you have that already; you just have to leverage that. I think the audience was your number one problem.

That’s fine. No, no. And actually, I saw that earlier today when I was looking the last chapters of your book, which actually full of information I wish I had known, but one of them was that whole idea of you can say ‘I want Facebook to advertise to these people on my mailing list, and I couldn’t decide whether this was brilliant and amazing or really creepy’. These people on my mailing list are going to [inaudible] seeing ads from me when they're on Facebook.

But why would it be creepy? If you are offering them value, like if you are saying ‘here’s the book I just wrote, I know you are interested in this because you subscribed to my email list, so here’s the book I just wrote’. If you are bringing value to them, why would they be creeped out? I personally would be happy to see something that I’m interested in in my Facebook News Feed instead of seeing ads I'm not interested in – I don’t know – about [inaudible] or something like that. I would rather see a more valuable content that I am interested in, to be honest. So I think that’s not creepy at all if you tackle it in the right way.

Mojca, what are some ways that people can make first that little tiny trust building step from ‘you’ve never heard of me, but you're seeing something from me that I paid Facebook to show you’? What are a few ideal ways to start building that trust?

I think users are very shocked in a kind of positive way when they see an ad that’s just pure value. So if they see maybe a longer post or if you boost your post on your Facebook page about how to get more clients with Facebook ads, for example, and if you have knowledge and bits in there and just advertise that without a link to your blog post, people are positively shocked because they're like ‘this is not advertising a blog post or a product. This is just pure value. I’m going to read this’. So I think that can be the first step of establishing trust because you're just offering them – you're not selling anything, you're offering them something of value for free. So I think that’s the perfect step in the right direction.

Another thing, maybe the second step should be your own – sharing your own personal story without, again, without linking to anything. Just some personal content just to get people to know you personally, and then maybe slowly try selling them something services, showing them your book without the hard sale pitch, but with just ‘here’s what you can learn from this book. Here’s why I wrote it’, maybe add some personal info in there and build up on that.

But I think the first step should be just sharing pure value without linking to your service or your book or your product of anything. I think just establishing trust with value.

Interesting. So it’s almost like you're saying do what you already do or hopefully already doing, but make your first couple of payments to Facebook before promoting ‘no strings attached’ content that has value.

Yeah. And you're going to benefit from that either way. People are going to visit your Facebook page if you do it the right way. People are going to like your Facebook page so they’ll become your advocates in the longer run, maybe subscribe to your newsletter and just follow you around. You'll be in their heads and that’s what's important.

Interesting.

So speaking of – you mentioned the book a couple of times. How much did you involve the audience, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or wherever else, in things like ‘I've got these two cover designs that the designers [inaudible]. Which one do you guys like better?’ – things like that. Did you involve them at all in the creative process or just show them the behind, like ‘here’s what my desk looks like’ – you mentioned that – but did you share like a sample chapter ahead of time, or did you ask ‘do any’ – use it for any kind of polling to say ‘hey, would you guys be more interested in a chapter on this or a chapter on this’, that kind of stuff.

I haven’t done polling, to be honest, because I didn’t have the time, but I did share screenshots of sample chapters, I think. I shared them with my email list first and my Facebook audience, but most of the time, I just took them behind the scenes because those posts were actually the most engaging ones so I think people resonated with that a lot. People love to see my messed desk; I don’t know [chuckles]. But they love to see that and I just posted that on. And I think it wasn’t the best strategy because I didn’t have the time to build the best strategy, but it was definitely better than not sharing anything. So I took them behind the scenes. They are my VIP list and they just – they value that and I’m happy.

So can you give us a – just a really quick step by step – I know we've talked through a lot of this, but just a really quick step-by-step for somebody who maybe has a product or service that they want to eventually promote on Facebook and they may have some community that they can start gathering together on Facebook?

So step-by-step on creating advertisings or –?

No, on building a community and then marketing to the community.

Mm-hm. So first of all, like we've mentioned before, you have to build your Facebook page because that’s the first step you need to take if you want to have all the features that Facebook offers with their advertising – in their advertising ecosystem. Second of all, of course, equip that Facebook page with nice image [inaudible], so nice header images. I think Brennan still doesn’t have a header image, and I’m just going to call him out on that [chuckles]. He’s really lousy when it comes to that, but he still doesn’t have a header image, and that looks unprofessional. But you should have a nice header image or cover image on your Facebook page just to look like a legitimate business that has taken the time to do that.

And then just – first of all, you should create your strategy that should be – like Philip mentioned a few moments ago, a mix of everything, so a mix of sharing value, personal posts, blah blah blah blah blah. And then what you do is when you are posting that content, you're constantly measuring things, so you're measuring how your audience is reacting to that content. Are they more interested in behind the scenes content like my audience was, or are they engaging with the polling questions, or are they engaging the most with the value post or blog post or whatever. So you're constantly measuring and based on the results you're getting, you're modifying the strategy along the way. So I think it’s just an on-going process, but it’s worth it.

So when you have that Facebook page set up, when you start building a community – by the way, when you first create your Facebook page, what you should do, you should organically advertise it to your audience. So you should share it with your Facebook friends first just to get that initial fans on your Facebook page, and then maybe share it with your email list, on Twitter if you have a

Twitter account, just to get that initial fan base.

But then later on when you have a Facebook page strategy and when you have that initial Facebook post, then you can start advertising to people. And just when you set off to advertise to people, you have to have your first goal, your number one goal that you wish to achieve, not just – you don’t want to shoot blanks, you don’t want to say ‘oh, I’m doing Facebook ads just for the sake of doing Facebook ads’. So you should have number one goal you want to achieve is that – I don’t know – building an audience, building a – getting new subscribers, whatever, and then just working from there on. But the initial should be, like you said, building an audience with great content and the first step in building an audience if you want to get that first Facebook page fans is just sharing that Facebook page with your friends on Facebook and your Twitter followers.

I’d like to ask a real specific question. One of the uses of advertising or paid traffic that is particularly appealing to me is testing things, specifically someone wants to explore positioning themselves in a new market, and maybe they’ve build an email course that is hyper focused on that market. They don’t want to see if that’s going to get traction. Is that a good use for paid Facebook or Twitter traffic, and if so, what's the most direct path to trying that out?

I think it’s worth experimenting with it, first of all because Facebook has a very detailed targeting you could tackle. So you can really, really – I think Reuven can confirm that because he’s read my book, so you have – you can really dive into all of the targeting options you have with Facebook. So I think that’s worth experimenting with. Like I said before, you should have that number one goal you have to achieve. You don’t do Facebook ads just for the sake of doing Facebook ads, but you have to be able to measure that effort you put into.

So if your number one goal is subscribers, you want to measure that. If your number one goals are just selling your book, you have to be able to measure that. So just picking the number one goal you want to achieve, and then based on that goal, you pick up an objective. Facebook has a couple of objectives you can choose from, like Facebook page likes, website conversions, website clicks, et cetera, et cetera, then just writing copy, creating visuals based on that number one goal you have to achieve – you want to achieve, and then targeting.

Targeting is a very delicate topic regarding Facebook ads because there's so much you can do with targeting. And if you want to use it for experimenting, I think, like I said, it’s – I think it’s worth doing that because you have all these options you can do with Facebook targeting. And then just working up on that like setting up your ads, optimizing your budget, and launching your campaign; but I think that’s worth experimenting with because of the targeting.

Thank you.

I have some, I think, some really also annoyingly specific questions [chuckles]. So these have tripped me up in the past and I – so therefore, I imagine that there are a lot of people listening who some [inaudible] the same things if they're really noobs with Facebook and Facebook pages.

So first, we've been talking about Brennan Dunn’s page – that’s come up a few times. I've got my personal – I call it private – friends only URL which is facebook.com/jonathanstark. If I wanted to make a page, does that mean that that URL’s gone because pages are also facebook.com/pagename. So when I have to come up with a different name –?

Yeah.

Ok. So that –.

You don’t need to come up with a different name. You can have the same name like Jonathan Stark, but you won’t be able to pick that URL, so you'll have to have a different URL, but that does mean that URL is going to reflect your name. So you have – you can have Jonathan Stark as you Facebook page name, but not the URL. The URL has to be different.

Ok. And then the first thing I asked you, and I remember this from the podcast that it gives you like a number of categories to pick. And my experience with toying with that, I had major decision paralysis about which one to pick because none of them were right. So I went in, I was like ‘well, none of these are podcast’ and it doesn’t really tell you – and it affects – it seems to affect some of the calls to action and things on the resulting page.

So if you're a freelancer and you want to use your name and face as your personal brand, as you said, what should you pick? There's like Company and Organization, or Public Figure, or Entertainment or Cause; there's a bunch of different things. What is the one that is going to result in the page that will be most useful to people who are solo consultants and freelancers?

I am googling right now. I have, I think, an article written about this because I haven’t done that in such a long time [chuckles]. But I know that a lot of people are struggling with it. The first thing I should mention is you are always able to switch that. So if you decide for example, a local company, now you can always switch that no matter how many fans you have and no matter how long do you have that Facebook page. So there's always an availability to just switch it up.

But the second thing, I don’t really know the answer to the question – I don’t have it on the top of my mind because I haven’t done it in such a long time and I know that things have been changing a little bit, but I think Facebook – this is definitely a thing that Facebook needs to make it better because, like you said, you get down to creating a Facebook page and that’s the first decision you have to make and you're always like ‘what should I pick from?’

Yeah. You don’t know the ramifications. If there's nothing that represents you directly, you don’t know the ramification. I’m looking at the page now, there's like Product and Service or Website; I don’t see podcast anywhere. You know what I mean? It’s like [crosstalk] immediately, it’s like I don’t know and I don’t know the ramifications of this decision, so I just go away.

Yeah. I know that you have – one of it is personality that might be good for freelancers and consultants. I think it’s like a public personality or something, but yeah – [crosstalk]. Public Figure, yeah; that’s it. But yeah, they need to work on – the vast majority of companies just pick – I don’t know – Company or something like that, or – I don’t know – Internet Software [chuckles]. I don’t even know what I have, to be honest, but yeah, that’s a little bit messed up, and I think that Facebook is going to improve that and they need to because that’s outdated. That’s been there for a few years now.

What I’m taking from your response is that it doesn’t matter that much so just pick something to move on.

Yeah, it doesn’t matter that much. I have been – I don’t know what I've had before, I don’t know what I have now, but I know that I have been switching it a little bit and I haven’t noticed much difference in it. So just – what is the difference is in the data that is – that Facebook is going to publish about you, so currently, I cannot have rates so people cannot rate my services or anything like that because I should have, I think, I should pick a category of Local Business if wanted to do that, but I don’t want to be a Local Business. But I think that – just some incremental changes about that, but I think it’s not very important what you pick. And also, like I said, you can always switch up. So if you don’t like what you have picked, switch it up.

Perfect. That’s perfect, thanks.

Alright. Well, I need to start wrapping up so I can get ready for the next show. I hate to do this because it’s been so fun to just look at all the stuff on Facebook and compare it to what I’m doing.

But yeah, let’s go ahead and get to the picks. Reuven, you want to start us off with picks?

Sure thing. So I've been dealing with computers and education for a long time. I did my PhD in it, and my big claim to fame is that my advisor’s advisor is the guy who created Logo, the programming language that many of you might remember with the turtle walking on the screen. And I've tried for years to get my kids and many other kids to get excited about programming with Logo. And you know, it’s showing its age where it has shown its age for maybe about 20 years already in that kids just don’t get excited anymore about watching a turtle, which is not really looking like a turtle at all, walking around the screen.

So my son came home from school last week, I guess this was on Thursday or Friday, and he said ‘this people came to our school, and they said statistics show there are not going to be enough programmers in another 20 years’. By the way, the next day he said to me ‘Dad, what is statistics?’ and he like – [chuckles] so he said that there's this new program in Israeli schools that they basically hire to start up a company where they [inaudible] company to teach them programming, and I rolled my eyes. I was like ‘oh, come on. How can this be?’

So basically, the tasks that they are giving these kids in this program are very similar to what Logo was doing 30 or 40 years ago, but it is so beautifully done and so compelling and so amazing, I've never seen my son so excited about anything having to do with school or programming, and the combination is mind-blowing. Basically, it’s this company called CodeMonkey or playcodemonkey.com, and they have – they teach you programming through really small, really short little exercises. And anyone who’s been looking at Logo for many years sees the similarity immediately, but the kids are actually learning to program in CoffeeScript.

And what they're doing is they're teaching a monkey to – or you tell a monkey to turn around and grab bananas. Then they tell the monkey to walk on top of the crocodiles, which move, and get the bananas, and so on and so forth. So yesterday when I called home from where I was working and I said ‘how is everything going?’ he said ‘oh, it’s amazing. I just learned that I can take the distance between the monkey and the banana and put it into a variable called X. Isn't that amazing?’ I was like ‘oh my god [laughter]. I can’t believe this is my 10-year old telling me what he learned and he did this all on his own’. I have never seen something so impressive and compelling for kids to learn programming, and if any of you have kids roughly like my son’s 10 years old, kids like 2 years older who’s [inaudible] that, I urge you to take a look at placycodemonkey.com. It is super, super cool.

That’s it for this week.

Alright. Jonathan, what are your picks?

As we record, this is just post-Thanksgiving in the US. And I got to tell you, we got this stuff called Sriracha Ketchup [crosstalk] –.

That sounds good.

Oh my god, it’s so good. If you like hot stuff, it’s not super hot, but I’m a huge ketchup fan. I’m weirdly passionate about ketchup; it’s so good. I love it on almost everything. And so we've had this giant pan of mashed potatoes in the refrigerator for – since Thursday, and I've just been slowly squirting Sriracha ketchup into the entire bowl and eating it. It’s so good. Anyway, you can go to roosterketchup.com, and on the home page, that’s exactly the one I bought and I’m telling you, it is really good.

And then just an announcement, not really a pick, but if folks who are listening have been thinking about joining my coaching program at expensiveproblem.com, I am going to be raising prices probably before the end of the year. So if you’ve been thinking about it, you're on the fence, you want to set up a free phone call to talk about it, then just go to expensiveproblem.com and we can get on Skype. That’s it for me.

Alright. Philip, what are your picks?

I have one pick this week. The road to from ‘I just started freelancing’ to ‘I have a real business’ is rocking and painful for a lot of us; it was for me. And there's a new book that is meant to smooth that road out, make it a lot shorter than it would be on your own. It’s something that myself, Jonathan and about 11 [inaudible], 10 other people including a three contributed content to. So what you’ve got is about a dozen experts coming together and teaching about what they have learned from 5 or more years of independent consulting work. Result is The Independent Consulting Manual; it’s a new book. It’ll be out by the time you hear this and available for purchase at independentconsultingmanual.com. So I would encourage you to check that out if you are finding any aspect of running a profitable freelance business to be frustrating or the learning curve is longer than you like. That’s it for me.

Very cool. I've got a couple of picks. One of them is the Freelance Remote Conf, like I said. In fact, today as we’re recording this is the last day of my Black Friday Sale where you could get tickets to all 12. And in fact, I threw in a 13th conference next year. I’m putting on a conference every month. Yeah, you can still buy the tickets; you just can’t get as good a deal if you get allremoteconfs.com. If you're particularly interested in the Freelance Remote Conf, you can just go to freelanceremoteconf – I think that’s what I – anyway, or you can go to allremoteconfs.com and then click on the little robot icon that says it’s for that conference. I’m going to be throwing in the podcasting conference. I’m not sure when I’m going to do it yet, but yeah, that’s out there too.

And then I’m also going to pick a game that I've become addicted to on my phone, and that is Clash of Clans. It’s just – I pick up my phone periodically and [inaudible] and attack stuff. That’s fun. So I’m going to pick that too.

Mojca, what are your picks?

I have several picks. Just a mix of everything and I’m just going to go through them. The first pick is a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I've read several amazing books this year, but this one I think impacted me the most, especially because it talks about how you can hack your life by changing bad habits into good ones or creating good habits from the start. Charles talks about the habit loop which goes from cue to routine to reward and then cue again and so on. He offers actually a framework for changing your habits that truly works; I've tried it. And it’s not like a [inaudible] book. It’s just common sense and he is putting it out there, so I truly recommend it.

The second pick would be a new iOS email client I have, and it’s called Spark. I've been using Mailbox before and have been hooked with their archiving system, but Mailbox is just shitty for the last couple of months. And a friend actually pointed me towards Spark, and the best new feature – the best feature is their Smart Inbox which actually filters one-on-one emails form newsletters and other mass mailings so I don’t get spammed and interrupted constantly on my mobile phone anymore.

And the third pick is an Easy Button from Staples [chuckles], and this is a fun one. Do you know what Easy Button is?

Mm-hm.

Yeah. I've actually read about this in a book called Essentialism by Greg Mckeown, and he describes his theory [inaudible] is essential on helping us explore what's essential and using play as a driver for creativity and exploration. So I bought an Easy Button as well, and I press it every time I get a notification on a sale from my Facebook Ads Manual [chuckles]. I wonder what my neighbors think [chuckles].

And a bonus pick would be my dinosaur onesie. Why? Because it’s just plain awesome and no other words are needed about dinosaur onesies [chuckles].

I have a friend that every time he sold one of his courses, his phone would go ‘cha ching!’

Ahh, I want that.

Yeah. I’m not quite sure how he set it up, but he did.

I think – I sold my book through Gumroad and Gumroad has some sound effects, I think, but they're not as catchy as ‘that was easy’ [chuckles].

Yeah. Do you have the button with you? Let’s hear it.

Yup, I have it right here. ‘That was easy’.

Awesome [chuckles]. Alright, if people want to check out what you're up to or get your book or just feel smart because they know who you are, how do they do that?

I want them first to tweet out to me on Twitter. My handle is @mojcamars. And the second thing is they can visit superspicymedia.com/freelancersshow and I have some free worksheets for them there,    some PDFs and     50%   discount        for      my       books.          So      that’s superspicymedia.com/freelancersshow.

Awesome. Well, thank you again for coming. I've got all kinds of ideas now for the stuff that I’m working on.

You know where to find me [chuckles].

Alright, well, we’ll wrap it up and we’ll catch everyone next week.