How to Make Money Using Facebook with $100 a Day

It’s not uncommon for new and established businesses alike to wonder if they’re spending enough on their marketing campaigns. Advertising costs are one of the only essential costs you’ll have even if you don’t have any clients yet, because they’re necessary to attract new clients and grow your business, no matter where you are now.

If you do a quick Google search about how much you should actually be spending on advertising, you can quickly find information about businesses that have $20,000 a month ad spend budgets, and immediately start wondering how it’s ever possible to keep up with that.

You don’t need to be spending tens of thousands of dollars every month to have a strong, well-funded, high-performing ad campaign. With a platform like Facebook Ads, you can invest whatever funds you do have into a relatively reliable ad platform, and start to win over new clients and make money quickly.

In this post, we’re going to look at exactly how you can make money with Facebook Ads using nothing more than great strategy and a $100 limit per day.

Why Facebook Ads is A Good Choice

Facebook Ads is an outstanding choice for both B2B and B2C businesses, no matter what your specific industry is, how big your business is, or what your budget is.

It’s a versatile platform, with outstanding targeting options and incredible customisation, including so many different ad formats that you can choose from to best suit your needs.

It also gives you the opportunity to go out and find customers instead of waiting on them. You don’t have to wait for there to be a demand for your product that sends people to find you, like you would with search ads; by showing the right creatives to the right people at the right time, you can create a demand.

Fresh eucalyptus delivered to your door isn’t something that many people were likely searching for or needing, but based on some of the ads we’ve seen from the newly-launched Eucalyptus Farms, they had no trouble in convincing people this was something they had to have.

Facebook Ads is also relatively cost-effective and budget-friendly. Though it can chew up your ad budget if you let it, you can spend as much as you have available and not a penny more and still get results with the right strategies. And since it has much lower cost-per-clicks and cost-per-actions than alternative PPC platforms like Google Ads, it’s a great choice when you need to make every penny count.

How to Make Money Using Facebook With Only $100 a Day

Anyone can make money with Facebook Ads, even if you have less than $100 a day. We want to put that out there up front, because there are plenty of small businesses who may only have $100 or $200 in ad spend per month, period.

Just because we’re not covering it in-detail here doesn’t mean it’s not possible, and note that all of our strategies that we’re using can be applied to smaller budgets, too. The $100 per day is a great number if you want campaigns that can help you run your tests quickly, reach large audiences well, and scale fast, but adjust the ad spend as needed to fit your business (or your client's’ business, if you’re running their campaigns for them).

1. Don't Keep Your Eggs All in One Basket

When you first get started on Facebook Ads, it’s a good idea to start small and to start diverse. You want to look at multiple different offers, audiences, and more.

It’s particularly important to try out different ad strategies early on. A personal trainer, for example, might come up with the three following strategies for their Facebook Ads:

Target men who have never worked out and feel intimidated but want to, talking about how the hardest part is just getting started. Go for a motivational feeling, and make people inspired to start now with a video reminder of what’s possible.
Target young mothers who are burnout and struggling to do “all the right things” with their limited time. Offer them a lead magnet with a free guide showcasing simple, time-effective exercises that work and burn calories fast.
Run an ad campaign focused on the community aspect of group classes, talking about support, accountability, and relationship building.

Facebook Ads can be tricky to start with; while you do want to take calculated risks, for the first few campaigns, it can be a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. You need to find out what strategies and subsequent messaging your audiences respond to, and sometimes it may surprise you.

Start small with the budget and big with the ideas. Divide up your budget equally at first between your different ad campaigns so each one is given a fair chance while you figure out what messaging, placements, and strategies will work for each individual audience.

2. Set Up a Funnel

We can never say this enough: funnels are so important for your success on Facebook Ads.

How many times have you seen an ad (say, for fresh, delivered-to-your-door eucalyptus, for example) and thought “that’s pretty cool” and then never saw another ad so you never actually converted? Probably many, many more times that you are even aware of.

The more a user recognizes your brand, the more likely they’ll be to engage with your ad and eventually convert as they move through the digital sales funnel.

Setting up an ad funnel, therefore, is the best way to ensure that you’re maximizing your ROI on your ads and actually pushing people all the way through discovery to the purchase stage. You can use custom audiences to help with this, retargeting users based on their specific interactions with your brand.

The exact funnels you set up will depend on your business, your advertising goals, and your current campaign structure, but a good example might look like this:

You run initial brand awareness campaigns with videos that introduce people to your brand’s story and what you do. You run several of these at once.
Follow immediately with a retargeting campaign, which shows a lead gen ad to everyone who watched at least 50% of your video ads. The lead ad has an Instant Form for users to fill out so you can land their information, and it includes an offer to get them to go this far.
You show sales-oriented ads to users who converted on your lead ad, which may include value-offers like free shipping or a promo code to entice them to convert. You also have ads designed to retarget users who have visited certain pages on your site but who also didn't see your purchase confirmation page, meaning they still haven't converted.

By the time users reach the last ads in your sequence, they’ll hopefully be familiar with your brand, hyper-targeted, and ready to purchase, and all they need is a nudge. Make sure that you’re following up with your audience on an automated basis so that no one slips between the cracks and none of your ad spend is wasted.

3. Run Split Tests

Split testing can be time consuming, but it’s also one of the best things you can do for your ad campaigns… especially if you’re on a budget.

Split testing involves running careful tests where you change one variable in an ad campaign, like only the images or only the copy. This allows you to see which specific factors in an ad actually help trigger conversions, helping you to find the most high-converting ads in a specific campaign and learning a lot about what works overall.

It’s particularly important to split test multiple creatives, particularly the messaging. Try out different combinations of “matching” headlines and ad texts that vary in style, length, emotional appeal, logical appeal, or the features and benefits you focus on most. Facebook will automatically allocate your money between split tested ads, so you’ll stay on budget but quickly find the secrets to more high-converting campaigns than if you just created single, one-off ads and tried to put the puzzle pieces together later.

4. Work by Process of Elimination

As your tests are up and running, you’re quickly going to find that some campaigns do well and some don’t.

And again, sometimes it will surprise you; we once ran a hyper-targeted, carefully planned out campaign for an ice cream company marketing to their vegan audience, only to find that the ad sunk quickly when targeted to vegan users in the area while it performed well to a general audience. The targeting was too small in the niche group, and it drove up frequency and sunk the relevance score, yielding $12 CPCs.

As you see that some campaigns are thriving while others are failing or even doing “just ok,” take action quickly. You can give them about a week or two to level out, but then go ahead and pause campaigns that aren’t performing well. As you get more data, you can allocate more ad spend to the campaigns that are yielding better results.

It’s important to pay attention to overall funnels and not just individual ads when assessing which are helping contribute to that ROI. Some campaigns, for example, will seem like they’re not bringing in any money at all, but those initial brand awareness campaigns that only get video views and likes are an essential step to getting sales later on. Keep this in mind and don’t chop too many campaigns at different crucial stages of the funnel, or you’ll end up with disjointed ads that don’t connect well and don’t lead to a proper path of conversion.

5. Keep Testing, But Intentionally and Strategically

While you’re whittling down your campaigns, it’s important to be intentional and strategic about the tests you’re running and which campaigns you decide to cut.

When you’re running new tests on completely new strategies, use smaller portions of your budget than you’d give to other established, known-to-be-profitable campaigns that are already up and running. This will give you the information you need to know whether or not it’s worth more of an investment, and even $10 a day can give you that data.

Once those new strategies have proven themselves in turn, then they can get bigger chunks of the ad budget if there is any ad spend left to give them.

6. Never Get Complacent

At this stage, you’re likely getting results with your $100 in ad spend daily, with a few tests underway that have started to show you what works and what doesn’t. Excellent.

It’s so important to keep in mind, however, that no ad campaign can live forever. Even your most high-converting, high-engaging campaign will eventually run into the obstacle of ad fatigue, where enough of your audience has seen the ad and has an ever-decreasing chance of clicking.

Facebook Ad manager screenshot showing frequency metric

Ad fatigue is a legitimate concern, because seeing the same ads get dull, and once that happens, your CPC increases and your conversion rate drops. Keep a close eye on your ads’ frequency and their performance, and as soon as a campaign starts to drop, switch it up. Either edit or end the campaign, and apply what you’ve learned to the next one, because even if you have a $10,000 a day ad budget, there’s no room for complacency as an advertiser using Facebook Ads. The second your audience sees that you’ve hit stagnation is the second you’ve lost them, because you have nothing new or valuable to offer them or use to keep their interest.

Conclusion

Facebook Ads is a flexible ad platform, allowing you to target exactly who you want, when you want, and for the budget you want. Since there are a number of tips and tricks you can use to keep your CPCs down, it’s also a pretty affordable ad platform despite being effective, which is great news for brands on a budget or those looking to maximise their ROI (and really, who isn’t?).

A good tip to keep in mind, though, is that while you should focus on maximising your ROI, you shouldn’t be so focused on keeping your bids down that you end up shooting yourself in the foot, limiting your placements and ad potential. Test any drops in bids or bid caps carefully so that you can make sure the lower cost isn’t costing you results in the long run.

Ana Gotter

Social Media Marketing Specialist

Ana is a strategic content marketer specialising in business, finance, and marketing writing, though she's worked across a range of industries. She works from her home in Orlando with her three dogs.