I call this Second Steps because I have dabbled with promoted posts in the past. The key to promoted posts is to write the post with the intention of it being boosted. If people are going to see just one thing written by you, what would you want them to see? That is the way to approach Boosted Posts, and you may well get offers of $10 free credit to boost something. If you do, then it is worth writing something, even as simple as rewording the message from a current DTRPG sale, and then boosting it.
The worst that can happen is that no one sees the boosted post, at best you could get some extra sales for free.
What ever happens, you are a little more experienced in marketing your stuff.
What I am dabbling with here is the Facebook Ads Manager.
These are the ads you see at the side of pages on Facebook and in the feed of Instagram (optionally).
You set a budget and hopefully you sell more than spent on the ads. If you get a net gain, then you are doing it right.
I am typically handing DriveThruRPG $1.48 per supplement sold. When I sell off of this site I pay PayPal about $0.40, and as a percentage that drops the bigger the basket of PDFs being bought as it drops towards 2%.
You can see that it is worth me spending $1.07 to get a sale from my site, compared to a sale via DriveThruRPG. When I become a non-exclusive publisher DTRPG’s cut would go up to $1.73, so it is even more worthwhile getting sales from my site.
First Impressions
I have previous experience of online advertising from Google AdWords, now Google Ads. Compared to the handholding that Google gives you, Facebook is definitely less user friendly. That surprises me, as I expected Facebook to know a thing or two about user interfaces and user experience.
There were some things in my newly set up ad campaign that are not how I wanted them, but I quite simply could not find a way to edit them, and two ads in two Ad groups in the same campaign gave me different options when trying to edit the settings. This is obviously a newbie error.
Facebook Store
One of the unintended spin-offs from setting up the Woo-Commerce WordPress plugin was that it does all the hard work in setting up a Facebook store. That would then appear as an extra tab on your Facebook page.
This seemed great, until my store was rejected by the review staff. The reason being that you cannot sell digital products on Facebook, and all my products are currently PDF.
I have parked this for the time being. I am building up my print product lines and getting everything in place. When I have print for sale, I am everything in place to start selling from Facebook.
This is one for the future.
Progress
With all pay per click (PPC) or pay per conversion (CPA) advertising the basic process is that you start out with what you hope is a killer ad, its earnings are a bit so-so or even loss-making, and then you refine your ad, making it better, and hopefully, you lose a little less or make a small gain. So you refine it again and keep revising your ads until you make a real positive gain, then you try and increase your budget so more people see this amazing ad you have created.
I have just created that first version of the first ad, and I already have a short list of things I want to improve.
This is one of the nice things about every online advertising platform I have used. If you asked me how to create an amazing online ad, I wouldn’t have a clue. Walk me through a process and let me see the results at each stage, then I can easily see what I could improve. It is the advertising version of getting over the blank page.
Update
I submitted my ads for review at 11:45 (my time) and I got the notification that they were approved at 18:25. I just thought is would be useful to have a realistic expectation of timings.