The difference between linear and non-linear ecommerce growth using Facebook
0So you're building your online business and let's say you've done all the setup work…
Let's say for the sake of argument that you've built your store…
you've found your products…
you've organised your fulfilment scenario…
Now you're starting to drive traffic…
You are looking to send people to your beautiful site so they can buy what you have on offer…
I've always come from the point of view that you should start small and test your offer.
That is… you send a few people there and see how many buy. Over a short time, you will be able to see how much you spend VS how much you make.
Really when it comes to an online business, these are the only numbers that matter.
Profit does not always happen right out of the gate.
Sometimes you've gotta tweak and play with your ads and your offer before you get the thing ‘just right' (or ‘just right enough') so that you make more than you spend.
If you can make more than you spend, and do that over a few days (to prove that it's not a fluke) then you are in a position to start scaling up.
Let's say that you start with a Facebook advertising budget of just $5 a day, and after a few days and a few tweaks to your ads and your offer you get to the point where you are spending $5 a day but averaging $10 a day in sales.
That's Spending $1 and getting $2 back. 100% profit!
So you expand out your ad budget to $10 a day and see if you can get $20 in sale back…
$20 a day to get $40 in sales…
If your offer keeps panning out and your target audience is large enough then you can just keep rolling that money back into the ad budget and expanding that out over time, making more money with each iteration.
So that's one way of doing it.
That's the linear model.
But there's a nonlinear model.
There's a way to get abundant, cheap and high-quality traffic to your offer that's not linear…
i.e. you are not just paying a certain amount per visitor… and to double your traffic you have to pay twice as much…
And that's using the viral capacity intrinsic in the nature of Facebook to grow.
The first thing you need to know is that when you first start, you’re going to be throwing Facebook ads at a wide audience… Kind of like throwing mud at a wall…
…you throw it and see what sticks…
“Sticking” being those ads and market segments that produce profit.
The second thing to then start paying attention to is how to engage that niche with ongoing content.
There are a few places online where you can find content that’s going viral… content that people are sharing like crazy.
(See buzzsumo.com to get an idea of this)
So lets map out a strategy (very briefly) that uses content that we already know is viral, to sell physical products that we already know are selling…
*Notice how nothing we are doing is re-investing the wheel here.
Let’s say you set up a small ecommerce site using shopify (actually you can get a free trial for a month here: http://internetphenomenon.com/freeshopifystore )
And you build a Facebook page on the same niche.
You can then run a small like campaign to get ‘likes’ for your Facebook page and you only target those people who you’ve identified as the best target audience for your product…
That means that you are driving people to your Facebook page who are most likely to buy your product…
Once they’ve likes your page – it’s kind of like having an email list… whenever you make a new post people will click it and go to your website to take a look… they might even “like” it, comment or share your post…
That’s where the viral factor can kick in…
Of course not all your posts are going to be selling physical products… some of your posts would be more viral type campaigns which do nothing more than provide entertainment or interesting information to your target audience…
Which they can again, share, comment and like…
This is just one way to drive traffic but when you understand the value of having these people like your page and engage with your content then you realise that using that platform to send people to your products is a relatively simple and constant source of traffic that is often much cheaper than paying for traffic in linear way.
That being said – I would do both…
Linear is going to constantly feed your page and website with new people and the nonlinear way is going to make the most of the viral method to get free shares and viral traffic to your store.
