How You Can Create a Targeted List Using Facebook Ads

The traditional method of building a solo ads list is to purchase solo ad after solo ad from different sellers to drive traffic to your squeeze page where you collect email addresses to add to your list. The problem with this method is that it costs money and it takes time.

Another problem is a good percentage of people that sign up on your squeeze page are “freebie seekers.” Freebie seekers are people that spend their time signing up for free stuff yet they never have any intention of every buying anything.

“The money is in the list.” Well that is true if your list buys but if your list is made up of Freebie Seekers then they will never buy. That makes your list – that you spent money building – worth much less.

The key is to get targeted subscribers on your list that are active and engaged and interested in a very targeted niche. That niche can be anything except getting free reports.

This allows you to build a list without Freebie Seekers which makes your list very valuable.

Exclusive Bonus: 
Download my PDF guide showing how I used Audience Insights to create my niche target, my Facebook Ad and my squeeze page.

How to Find a Targeted Niche

Finding a targeted niche is easily the hardest part of growing a targeted and engaged list. Here is a simple four step process that you can follow to find a targeted niche.

1. Start with a broad targeted niche
2. Break this niche down by region, sex or age to get a smaller niche
3. Break this niche down again using one of the metrics above that you did not use in step 2
4. Find a category in this smaller niche to build your targeted list from

Let me give you a very detailed examples of how this works using Audience Insights on Facebook.

Example : Geocaching

If you have never goecached before let me explain what it is.  Geocaching is the recreational activity of hunting for and finding a hidden object by means of GPS coordinates posted on a website.

My younger sister is addicted to geocaching. She has personally found over 2,200 geocaches throughout the world. I have gone out with her on multiple geocaching trips and it is addictive.

Anyone that is even somewhat active can participate in geocaching. I have seen kids as young as 5 out on a geocache trail and I have seen couples in their 80s on the same trail. This is why geocaching is so popular because anyone of any age or fitness level can do it.

The barrier to entry is small in that most people can purchase a $9.95 app for their mobile phone and use the GPS features in their phone to find a geocache. Or you can purchase an affordable handheld GPS like the Garmin eTrex 20 GPS.

Now that you understand my broad target of Geocaching let me show you how I use Audience Insights to break this down into a very active and targeted niche.

1. Geocaching  – Audience Insights shows a targeted audience of 100k – 150k monthly active people
2. Just in the United States – Audience Insights shows a targeted audience of 50k – 60k monthly active people
3. Age 25 – 54 – Audience Insights shows a targeted audience of  30k – 35k monthly active people
4. Interests in International City/County Management Association – Audience Insights shows a targeted audience of

Geocaching tourism is my targeted niche. This niche only applies to county, city and state government agencies that want to use geocaching as a means to draw tourists into their area. Of course the goal is to have these tourists spend money in the county.

The reason I chose this very targeted niche because my younger sister just organized the very first GeoTrail in Jackson County, Georgia where she lives. The GeoTrail combined her passion for geocaching and the desire to bring tourists into the county where her husband happens to also be the County Manager.

A neighboring county had created their first geocaching tourism event and had 49 people attend the event. When my sister organized the Jackson County Heritage GeoTrail event she was hoping to get 50 people to attend.

The Jackson County Heritage GeoTrail is a collection of 30 geocaches placed at historic locations spread across the 9 unicipalities and unincorporated areas of Jackson County.

On the kickoff day the Jackson County Heritage GeoTrail had 326 people attend. Now that this GeoTrail has been created then people will be visiting Jackson County on an almost daily basis from now on to find the geocaches.

What value has that had to Jackson County? Well just using the self-reported amount spent from attendees that filled out a questionnaire, over $11,000 dollars have been spent in the county in less than 30 days.

That is a substantial amount of revenue for the county especially when you realize the actual amount spent is much, much higher since everyone did not complete the questionnaire.

People can from as far away as South Dakota to attend the event so they had to stay at hotels in the county. It takes anywhere from 7 10 10 hours to complete all 30 geocaches. People were spending money on food, gas and other items in the county.

In fact on the kickoff date the owner of a BBQ Restaurant in the county called my sister shortly after lunch. He said that he had been in business for over 15 years and he had never sold out of BBQ until that day. He actually had to close down his business early that day because he did not have any more BBQ to serve people dinner.

With such a targeted niche as “geocaching tourism” you can start making a pitch to county and city governments to put together a geocaching event in their county for a fee of say $1,000.  With budgets being very tight everywhere, county governments might be very skeptical to buy your services. So instead you can say you will do it for free in exchange for payment of 10% of the income reported on questionnaires in the first 30 days after the event.

I live in Georgia which has the second most counties of any state with 254. If you could get just 10% of the counties to purchase your geocaching tourism service then you can easily generate around $25,000 in income.

How many other people do you know that are offering a “geocaching tourism” service? I bet you know of nobody doing it. This gives you a highly targeted and active niche to go after.

Targeting Your Niche on Facebook to Grow a List

Keeping with my geocaching tourism example, let me show you how you can start targeting county and city managers. There is an organization appropriately called “International City County Management Association”. It has a website at ICMA.ORG.

By looking at Facebook’s Audience Insights I can select an interest of International City/County Management Association. This returns a very targeted audience of 25k – 30k monthly active people in the United States.

If I want to narrow this down to just my home state of Georgia, the target market drops down to 1k – 1.5k monthly active people. This is an extremely targeted audience.

I can repeat this process for each neighboring states like Alabama, Florida and Tennessee. This would allow me to target nearby states also for my new “geocaching tourism” service.

Now that you have a targeted niche you need to start running Facebook Ads to this audience.

How to Build a List in Your Targeted Niche

The next step is to run a Facebook Ad to your targeted nice and get them to give you their email address. The best way of accomplishing this is by giving them something they want in exchange for them giving you their email address.

For my Facebook Ads I put together a 22 page report showing how Jackson County generated over $11,000 in revenue in less than 30 days. This report shows how the Jackson County Heritage GeoTrail planned, organized and hosted their geocaching event.

I can run a Facebook Ad directly to my custom audience that I created in Audience Insights. I can choose to target the entire United States or just the state of Georgia. My preference was to start locally and then build up nationwide from there.

My Facebook Ads are run using CPC (Cost Per Click) instead of CPM (Cost Per Impression). Why did I chose CPC?

When you run a Facebook Ad that is CPM, Facebook will charge you for every 1,000 impressions or in plain English every time you ad shows up in somebody’s newsfeed. You are charged whether or not that person ever clicks on your ad to get your free report.

With CPC you are charged every time somebody clicks on your ad.

I choose to run CPC ads because I assume people are clicking on the ad if they are interested in the free report. Remember I want to build a list of active and engaged subscribers. By clicking on the ad they are showing they are engaging with my ad and are interested.

The goal of building my list is to get people that are interested in my “geocaching tourism” services. This allows me to avoid “Freebie Seekers” from getting on my list.

How to Monetize Your List

Now that I have my targeted email list I need to start monetizing this list. There are multiple of options available to me.

The first option is having county managers that are interested in creating their own geocaching event reach out to me to find out more about my “geocaching toursim” services. They can easily reach out to me because I included my contact information in the free report they downloaded. By selling my services I can earn approximately $1,000.

A second option is to continue marketing to the email list using an autoresponder series. An autoresponder is a mechanism for you to write emails that will be sent to your list on certain days after they initially signed up to your list to get your free report. The best autoresponder services are through Aweber or GetResponse email services.

For example you can create short emails that talk about geocaching tourism. These emails will be sent automatically to your list on a specified date. In every email you can include your contact information for them to reach out to you for more information.

Remember that governments are slow to respond and take action. My sister spent almost 6 months campaigning before the county government agreed to hold the geocaching event.

A well planned out autoresponder series allows you to constantly market to these county managers for this lengthy time period it takes for them to agree to hold a gecoaching event. Your autoresponder emails should address any possible objections that the county manager might have so that when they decide to take action they have no objection left to stop them.

A third option would be to create a detailed step-by-step course that shows the county manager how to create a geocaching event. You could sell this course for $397. If the county government could not afford to pay you $1,000 to create the event for them, they might be able to afford $397 for the course and have their own county employees be responsible for creating the event.

A fourth option is to over a la carte services to county governments that are creating their own geocaching event. Some examples would be to create the design for a t-shirt that they can sell to attendees. You might charge $100 to create the design and then maybe a fee of $1.50 per shirt to have them printed and delivered to the county. The county can then sell these shirts at a markup and make income from the sales.

A fifth option is to offer a smaller geocaching event that might be seasonally based. The Jackson County Heritage GeoTrail has 30 geocahces. You can sell county managers on having a seasonal geocaching event with about 6 geocaches in it that has a Christmas theme. This event would start in December. This would allow the county to attract tourists to major retailers in the county to find the geocaches. The goal is to have these tourists also spend money in the retail stores during the peaking spending period of Christmas. You could also do geocaching events around sporting events in the county or other holidays like Easter or Halloween.

These are just some examples of how you can monetize your list.

Just remember that the targeted niche of “geocaching tourism” can be an annual recurring income stream. If the geocaching event generates a substantial amount of revenue for the county they will want to do this each year.

Download my PDF guide showing how I used Audience Insights to create my niche target, my Facebook Ad and my squeeze page.