Facebook Insights for Publishers: How to Leave Plantation and Earn $7k+ With SmartLinks

Once again, we’re here to prove that years of formal marketing education aren’t a must to make money on traffic monetization. For example, our today’s hero has already made more than $7,000 after 10 years of working on a plantation in Indonesia, with no digital background, and no marketing degree. 

Only free courses, tips from friends, Facebook, Monetag Smartlink – and here we go, a success story worth telling your grandkids.

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About the Publisher

Our publisher monetizes social media, and most of the traffic – organic traffic! – comes from Facebook. His workflow is simple: 

• He creates Facebook pages where he posts reviews on various e-commerce products 
• These posts contain links to his blog
• The blog uses Monetag Smartlink

The story behind his successful social media looks like The Pursuit of Happyness movie: for 10 years, he was a farmer worker, but things changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Here is what he told us about it:

Before I knew the world of monetization, I worked in agriculture for 10 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I tried to learn from friends and e-courses about digital marketing, SEO, and affiliate marketing. While working, I took time to learn these things until I could make money from them. In 2024, I decided to go full-time into the world of affiliate marketing and monetization.

Since he began his monetization journey, he has already earned almost $8,000:

Note: the statistics under the Onclick tab shows, in fact, Smartlink results: this is how it’s displayed on your Monetag account.

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How To Do It? Facebook Organic Traffic Formula

Social media works best when your content is engaging, especially when you seek organic reach. You need to post something that’s interesting, helpful, funny, or just a bit different to inspire people to join – but that’s not an easy task. Besides, boosting a Facebook group or page from scratch might also take much effort, so our publisher chose another way. 

Let’s take a closer look at each step.

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Content

As the publisher shared with us:

My biggest mistake in monetizing on social media was that I did not understand how to create content that was interesting to users. So, the click rate was quite low. Then I learned: having targeted traffic must be balanced by engaging content.

Through trial and error, he figured out which posts perform well and which ones just don’t. Here is an example of what wasn’t quite effective:

Why? Such content, as our publisher called it, was ‘too hard selling’. Although it seems pretty useful for readers, it turned out, the majority of people on social media prefer someone’s story and experience compared to sales posts. 

This made the publisher switch to reviews and experience sharing. Here is an example of a post that really generates views and clicks:

This one doesn’t sell too blatantly – it simply shows the product advantages, and motivates users to click on the link I provide. Honest reviews are usually more likely to generate sales than trying to sell as hard as possible.

What’s also important: our publisher, as he puts it, ‘routinely creates’ interesting content every day. Each content piece contains a Call To Action to his blog. The blog post contains a link that automatically opens two offers: one from Smartlink and an additional one, as a way to maximize traffic.

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Paid groups

Our publisher doesn’t create groups himself. As he confessed, posting on active, high-quality Facebook fan pages that match his blog niche is the fastest way to get big traffic. 

How does he pick the right pages? Here are two criteria he follows:

• The group must match the publisher’s blog niche: eCommerce, online shopping
• The groups must have an engaged audience that seeks promo and coupon information

Quick fact: Most of the users of such fanpages are women aged 25 to 35 years old. And, according to the publisher’s Monetag statistics, the most profitable GEOs are Chile, Mexico, and Spain:

So, how to use a ready page? The legit option is to become a temporary moderator of such a page, for a fee, and create guest posts for subscribers. Our publisher spends about $100-$150 for posting in a single group – and this investment totally pays off, as you see from the stats. 

Overall, such an approach allows you to begin earning and scale quickly enough: you can partner with more and more fan pages without taking time to develop your own. Today, our publisher is aiming to sign with more groups and get at least 200k impressions every day.

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Analyzing the results

Our publisher manages his results in Meta Business Suite, but mainly looks at only two metrics:

• Engagement rate per post. This helps evaluate how interesting the content he creates. To keep management more tangible, he sets a KPI of at least 10% engagement of overall impressions. 
• Click Through Ratio. This is essential to evaluate the copywriting and CTAs that he creates. Here, the KPI is a minimum of 1% of impressions.

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Want to Copy-Paste This?

Now you are armed with a clear strategy – that works especially good if blended with Monetag. As our publisher shared:

I worked with various monetization platforms, but Monetag had the best conditions, and I am happy with the sustainability: Monetag can provide peace of mind in monetizing traffic.

In more precise words, Monetag provides you with: 

So, if you want to get the most out of your Social traffic, you are welcome to join.