How to gain more blog visitors – Facebook adverts vs Facebook Groups

A month ago I wrote about how trying Facebook groups gave me a 300% boost in traffic to my website. Now I want to update you on how that is going and why I still think its a really GREAT way to get targeted people to view your content.

On January the 11th this year i wrote about what happened when I started using Facebook groups to share my content the post is here. In a nutshell, visitor numbers went up, for me through the roof, for bigger bloggers maybe just a little rise but I am still at the beginning of all of this. So i just want to share my experience and tips again if any of you are new to the marketing of your blog or website! I make no claims to be an expert in this so if you have advice for me PLEASE share it at the bottom of the page as i will listen to all advice as well! However….

The rise in visitors really gave me the confidence boost i was looking for, and encouraged me to make my own Facebook group to be able to share content on there without being at the whim of other groups’ Admin, Moderators and timescales. I will explain more about the perils and pitfalls of that later tho.

So i want to share how the whole month has been going. Each day I have been posting a link and description into about fifteen or so Facebook groups, If you want the TL, DR version the graph kinda says it all! (especially if you click it ;), The graph above is from the 8th of January when I first posted content into the groups, till today, the 8th of February. As you can see the numbers of visitors held steady at about 600 900 views, and on one day in particular they shot through the roof!

This was me posting one page, or one resource from my teaching Blog (this one) onto Facebook groups, with the exception of yesterday. Which still pulled in nearly 500 people without marketing (that’s the ultimate aim) to be able to be more hands off with the marketing side of things, and just be able to concentrate on the content side.

This graph is the comparison from December to January, and to February the 8th. In December I added just a little content, I was trying to build up steam at that point, and in January I tried to add something on most days. I have no idea why I seemed to miss Wednesdays! It wasn’t by design. As you can see there is a huge increase in views and visitors.

Now in this time i also paid for a Facebook advert, it was on this post (a post about motivational quotes and teaching), which is fine. It is nice and helps people through the day and i thought i might do well with an advert. I put 10 dollars down for 3 days and targetted teachers, and people with an interest in education and they certainly saw it! Over 15000 people and 1000 likes on facebook! not bad.

but… can you guess which day that was? i have the January graph on the image above, see if you can guess which day it was. I will put an advert (sneaky i know) below this so you can’t see the answer right away.

Now if you are like me you would have said January 26th with that huge spike in visitors, over 3500 on that one day alone, but like me you would have been wrong!

The day, well 3 days. I had this ad running were on the 8th. 9th, and 10th of January, right at the beginning. There were some visitors that day, but nothing compared to what came later, when I stopped advertising with Facebook. If you look at the image below it shows you i have 994 engagements, but this is on Facebook, not clicks to my website, so people were liking it on their Facebook feed but that didn’t translate to visitors to the website, and that was an issue. In fact only 9 visitors are recorded through this advert.

I think there is push-back on Facebook especially when people see the words sponsored or ad and this push back stops people clicking through to your site, now as a new site it was just an experiment, but it appeared and continues to appear to me that if you want to target people to your site then instead of paying Facebook to send them the content as an advertisement just join a page that is similar to your subject and start putting your posts, resources and articles in there.

It is working better than advertising for me, and it costs me about 15 mins a day. You will soon know if what you are writing and presenting is popular or not, and it gives you the opportunity to engage and help people or offer advice in the group.

Now i am a new site, or most of my content is new, so as of yet my SEO is not going to be hitting google search engines, though i do rank first for my website title which is nice. So until i can see my pages appearing in search engines this is great way to drive traffic to my little corner of the internet for the sake of 15 mins a day waht have you got to lose!

Hope that helps if you have other tips and tricks feel free to post them at the bottom.

Post by Marc of Making English Fun

About the Author

Hi I’m Marc. A teacher of over 15 years, mostly English but dabbled in outdoor pursuits and media. Thought is was about time to sharing both what I have learnt during that time and the resources I have put together. On this site we aim to teach the theory and share our thoughts, but also go that one step further and give you access to the hard resources you need for your class or for you children. Feel free to take a look at our resources, email us on info@makingenglishfuncom.wpcomstaging.com, or jump on the Facebook group to ask questions. Happy learning, teaching or playing!

Making English Fun!

I have been a teacher of English for over 15 years, in that time i made hundreds and thousands of resources and learnt so much i think its worth sharing. Hopefully to help teachers and parents around the world.