How to Use Facebook Ads to Gain Subscribers and to Promote a Giveaway

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ads, book marketing, Facebook, giveaway, marketing, Newsletters, promo, subscribers

As promised at the end of my post, My Facebook Ads Experience and 3 Marketing Rules, here are two alternative ways you can use Facebook ads to gain subscribers and to promote a giveaway.

One Alternative Model

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During December, I teamed up with authors Autumn Birt and P.H. Solomon to run Facebook ads in order to gain subscribers.

The way we did this was by giving away one book each, and sharing the subscribers among ourselves.

Autumn set everything up, and she did a wonderful job. We spent $1 daily each, and ended up with 85 new subscribers at a cost of $30. This means that each subscriber cost us just $0.35.

The only drawback with this model is that there is no tripwire page. Which means there’s not even the possibility of you recouping the money spent on the ads.

Incidentally, we are now planning the next ads, so if you’re interested in joining us, just let me know. The more of us, the lower the cost per subscriber – and the more enticing the offer!

A Second Alternative Model

I ran a final experiment in December, this time in support of my Runaway Smile giveaway. I’ve been wondering whether it made sense to advertise a giveaway in Facebook instead of the more traditional websites.

So, I thought I’d create an ad and use the promotion to gain some new subscribers. I created a dedicated page on my nicholasrossis.com blog, and set up an ad.

I gave it a total budget comparable to what most promoters charge: $30.

This worked beautifully! I created two ads: one was a Boost Post kind of ad, and it had a CPC of $0.09 (!). The other was a traditional ad, which had a CPC of $0.28.

The Boost Post ad had a reach of 1,172 people, for an amazingly low budget of $5. It led to 53 clicks, all of which I assume led to downloads.

The ad had a reach of 1,446 people, for a budget of $24. This led to 84 clicks. Again, I assume that all of these led to downloads.

So, how many subscribers did I gain?

None.

Stupidly enough, I had left a direct link to Smile’s Amazon page, where people could download the book for free during the giveaway. This made subscription completely optional, and its telltale that no one bothered to subscribe, despite the fact that almost 140 people saw that page and (probably) downloaded the book.

Still, if you consider that I had some 400 downloads while that ad ran, and I only announced it here and on Books Butterfly, I’d say it was a win. One with a major lesson learned, of course – next time, don’t send people to Amazon without making them subscribe first 🙂

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