- The Koerner Office
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- Newsletter #00060
Happy Friday!
I have an awesome business idea/plan for you today that costs $0 to start.
Facebook is having a moment right now, and both of these things are true:
1 in 4 humans use Facebook every day, more than ever before.
Fewer people are posting to Facebook than ever before.
What does this create? A supply and demand imbalance. An asymmetric bet. All of my love language words, basically.
Why is this happening? It’s no longer cool to post to FB, we post to IG or other platforms. Also, the algorithm would rather show you viral clickbait garbage, anyway.
But people are still logging in and using Facebook!
Enter FB Groups. This is one of a few reason people are still logging in, to stay connected to their groups.
I’ve been exploiting FB Groups for years.
For one, every time Buc-ee's announces a new location we start a new FB Group called "Fans of Buc-ee's (new location name)" This organically brings us tens or hundreds of thousands of members, to which we'll sell many thousands of dollars worth of products to. Here’s 1 example:
Our biggest group has 156k members and we have around 300k across 20+ groups.
We cross promote across all groups to create a flywheel. Everything funnels back to Texas SnaxTexas Snax, but we promote very rarely and let the members drive 95% of the engagement.
Ok, so how can YOU capitalize?
For one, you can simply start a group. Any group, in whatever niche you prefer.
Facebook will eventually send you members. Seed it with some friends and family and start posting in there. FB will do the rest, but be patient.
You don’t want a group just to have a group. You want to collect emails from new entrants, using this tool. I know of no other tool that can make this possible. Not a sales pitch, I use this tool every day and have for months.
It will put emails in a Google Sheet and then you use Zapier to connect it to wherever you want it to go.
But how else can you monetize FB Groups?
You can buy one and start to monetize it.
I have a friend that bought a Hawaii tourist FB group that wasn’t being monetized. He now sells pinned FB posts as ads to local tour guides and makes a few grand per month.
He paid $2k for the whole group. Not a bad investment!
The vast majority of FB Groups are not monetized. But they have an audience! And YOU can see how engaged that audience is before you make an offer to the admin.
Where to find advertisers? IN the actual FB Group! Make a post.
Let’s say you buy a group called Best Restaurants in Plano, TX with 10,000 people for $1,000.
After buying you post an ad, offering to feature other restaurants for $200. There will be restaurant owners in that group. There will also be people that know restaurant owners in that group.
As the new owner/moderator you have full control over what comes in and out of that group.
After purchasing you change the questions asked to new entrants to ask for their email address, but don’t make it required. In my experience, about half of people will give it to you.
Now you’re also building a hyper local newsletter email list that you can monetize at about $.50 - $1 per email per month.
Some of these groups organically get hundreds to thousands of new members per day.
You do the math on that.
Then you can buy up 3-5 more Plano FB groups and scale this strategy. More ad dollars and more emails being collected.
Many cities have dozens and dozens of groups. Some niches have thousands of groups.
What if you bought one of the many thousands of groups for real estate investors?
Require an email to new members.
Go to Lending Tree and find all the mortgage brokers paying $50 per lead for new mortgage leads. That’s your customer. They are already spending heavily on leads.
Offer to sell him your new FB Group leads for $5 each. He gets a 90% discount and you make 10x per lead that you would by running a newsletter.
Just by playing middleman.
Repeat this strategy in any niche or geography.
My other friend, H, is doing something so spectacularly clever and sneaky with FB groups that I promised not to divulge. But he is cleaning up. It’s very similar to what I’m talking about here, but with a twist. Get creative. No industry is off limits…
I started this FB Group from scratch under a year ago. It had zero members. Today it has 2,000, (No paid ads, all organic) and they’re mostly real estate investors, and 947 of them gave me their email address.
Some of them are reading this right now. Hey guys! (awkward…)
To recap, here’s where the opportunity is:
Start a FB Group from scratch and see what happens. No downside.
Do the same as the above and use this tool to collect emails from new entrants. $20 downside.
Start joining FB Groups with low spam and high engagement. Start posting and adding value. Get to be friends with the moderator. Then offer to buy it. Ask for their price. Value it at 5 cents per member, or as low as they will go, but be willing to pay up to 10 cents per. This number can go much higher if it’s a high value audience like real estate investors.
After buying, add the email collection tool and start getting emails, even if you have no clue what to do with them.
Play middleman between FB Groups and advertisers or people that want to buy leads in those niches. Use Lending Tree, Thumbtack, Angi, etc, to find companies that are already paying way too much for leads like these.
Once you get your first dollar, be sure to file for an LLC and EIN so you don’t get in tax trouble. I use these guys for both services and it’s super user friendly.
I’ll make a YouTube video with more detail on this one day soon.
Please share with a friend with my referral link below if this was helpful.
And if YOU reading this might ever want to advertise with me, respond to this email!
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Your favorite toxic optimist,
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner
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