A great way for new Teespring Creators to generate sales at no cost is using free traffic – and one way to do this is using Facebook pages. Not everyone has money to invest in advertising upfront, so creating an online following organically can help generate profit that can be reinvested in paid ads later on. Teespring’s Bangladesh Country Manager, Zafi, has kindly shared some tips on how Creators can encourage sales through free traffic on Facebook.
Things you’ll need:
- A niche based Facebook profile
- A niche based Facebook group
- A niche based Facebook page
If you plan to use paid ads in the future, make sure you have your Custom Audience set up before driving any traffic to your campaign page. Keep in mind you won’t have to pay a dime to Facebook until you run an advertisement.
Part 1 – Optimize your personal Facebook profile
Make sure your Facebook username is your real name; this is important to avoid getting your account banned for being “fake”. Here are some ways you can optimize your personal profile for selling:
- “Like” as many pages related to your niche as possible.
- Engage with the content on those pages (like, comment, view videos, etc.).
- Like and reply to other people’s comments on those pages.
- Make as many niche based friends as you can. But do not spam people by messaging them links to your campaigns, pages, asking them to buy, etc!
- Always share niche based content from other, related pages using your profile until your own page has at least one thousand “Likes”.
- Interact with your friends (niche based) so that in future when you share your products, they will be interested and purchase them.
Part 2 – Grow your group
Groups are great for encouraging engagement and strengthening your community relations; keep in mind however that you cannot use groups in your ad targeting. Follow these steps when creating and maintaining your groups:
- Create a Group in Facebook.
- Give it a community type name; never make your group name the same as your page name. For example: Bike Lovers Hangout/Bike Lovers Community/Bike Lovers Territory.
- Add people to your group manually who have become friends with your personal profile. Do not use any automation software.
- Before adding people, make sure your group is all set up and looks nice – i.e. add content, cover images, etc.
- Add an awesome cover photo of (851×315 pixel) – you can use canva.com very easily and for free if you don’t have photoshop skills.
- Continuously post interesting content within the group so that people keep coming back and engaging with your content.
- Try uploading viral videos to your page then share your page post within the group. This will help increase your page likes.
Part 3 – Promote your Facebook page
This is the last step to promoting your Teespring products for free. Set up a Facebook business page and focus on building your ideal audience (getting likes). As we know, your Facebook page will function as the face of your brand so this is a very important part of the process.
- Name your page something unique and original – so that nobody can complain it’s a copy of another page…in this business, there is no place for copying! The page name should be related to your niche, but it shouldn’t be the exact same as the group name. Keep in mind when sharing content from your page within your group we don’t want it to appear like we are promoting ourselves (i.e. don’t say – like this page now!).
- Make sure to entertain your audience regularly! Share valuable information and interesting content with the audience. Keep in mind people love to share funny and feel-good content.
- In your Facebook Profile bio (a little line can be written below your profile picture) write: Here is my passion: page URL (use a goo.gl shortened link) so that you can track how many clicks are coming from what location. You should be tracking every channel related to your business to see what works the best.
This post is not the complete guide to page maintenance. It’s a blueprint for getting started. Keep following your competitors because, as I always say, “your competitors provide the best education for your business.” Keep an eye on their activities, their content, their post sharing schedule, their behaviour, language, their way of replying to followers, etc. Use their most engaging content as inspiration – do not copy them, modify what they’ve shared to suite your own audience.
Pro tip: Eventually, you can run ads that only target your pages’ audiences and you can also create LLAs (Lookalike Audiences) out of existing page likes too. This makes helps you to make profit quickly, without spending a lot of funds on targeting irrelevant audiences.
Ready to invest in ads?
If you have some money to invest and want to make profit faster and with less risk, here is my tip: the first step is creating Custom Audience(s) before sending any traffic to your campaigns. For example, if you have 500 visitors to any of the Custom Audience events (i.e. View Content, Add to Cart and Purchase), you can run a promotion (10% discount offer ad) for buyers who previously visited your campaign page. This is what we call a retargeting audience and offering a discount can be very effective in generating more sales. You can also generate more sales by creating a Lookalike Audience (Video 3) then running ads to those big audiences. If all these marketing terms seem unfamiliar to you, it’s ok. I was once a newbie too. The Paid Advertising section of the Teespring Training Center has a lot of educational content to help you get started. Good luck!
