Facebook changes = death to small business?

Many blog and small business owners look to Facebook as a way to promote their businesses. The goal is to build up a page with a lot of fans and promote, right?

Well, Facebook has been making it harder. Page owners have been seeing for awhile that organic reach (which means people you can reach with your message without paying for it) has been dropping. In fact, any update you put on your Facebook page is likely to be seen by 10% or less of your “fans”.

And it is about to get a lot worse. Read this news story on Medium:

Facebook news feed change is death to small businesses

The summary version is that Page updates are about to get filtered out of the newsfeed and put into a separate place. Which means, essentially, 0% organic reach. Only if you PAY to distribute the content will it reach the newsfeed.

Now to be clear, this is in testing phases right now. They are testing this out in 6 countries and chances are you don’t live in one of them. But, the fact that they’re testing it is still important.

The truth is that Facebook is a “pay to play” environment for businesses. And quite frankly, it SHOULD be. You and I…. we go to Facebook to see what our friends and connections are doing. We go for cat memes. We don’t go there to be fed a stream of commercial messaging.

So, it makes sense.

Plus, Facebook is a public company. Their only real duty is to make money for the shareholders. They will do whatever it takes to keep that trend going up.

So, as a blogger, as a business owner…. you HAVE to keep your use of Facebook in perspective. You don’t own anything there. You don’t own your page. You don’t own your group. You have no rights to anything on Facebook. It belongs to THEM and they can change the rules any damn time they feel like it.

So, whatcha gonna do?

Well, a couple things that I want to remind you of this morning…

#1 – You Absolutely Have To Build Your Blog/Business In Such A Way To Fund Paid Traffic.

Let me be clear…

The world of traffic has changed substantially over the years. Today, paid traffic is just a fundamental business expense. To try to build up without it is getting increasingly harder.

Monetization used to be something you did after you had enough traffic. Now…. monetization is done to FUND growth. (click to tweet this)

Monetization should be done from Day 1. It funds your own growth in the modern age. Monetization is a growth tool.

In The Online Business Roadmap (inside The Lab), I bring students through this in the right order. What you’ll notice is that we tackle list building and monetization before you ever write a blog post. In fact, by the time you spend much time on your blog, you will have already made your first sales.

I do that on purpose…. because monetization FUNDS growth. Not to mention that… it is always better to start up a blog on a proven concept that has already made money, right? 🙂

#2 – Build. Your. Email. List.

The most important asset to the entire future of your blog and business is your email list. It is one medium of communication which happens to be most effective, but also YOU OWN IT. No middleman like Facebook can change the rules.

When Facebook makes changes like this, I really don’t care. Why? Because my email list is here and I control it…. and my business is set up to fund paid traffic. I have kept social media in perspective for years now and I treat them as what they are: Other People’s Assets. Not mine.

If you are overly reliant on social media profiles for your traffic and you’re not building and regularly communicating with your email list, then your priorities are screwed up.

If you haven’t seen my guide on list building, check out this mega-post: The Ultimate Guide to List Building

So, that’s the news for today, my friends.

Facebook is essentially a utility today. But, like all utilities, there’s a bill if you want to use it. We have an electric bill, a water bill, yada yada. And, if you want to use Facebook to promote your blog and business, you’re going to have a bill for that, too.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s good. And to be expected. It would be naive to think otherwise, and you’re wasting your time to complain about it.

But, you need to structure your blog and your business to function in the environment of today. Most bloggers are still growing as if the internet is as it was 5-7 years ago. Back in the days when you could SEO and guest post your way to success. Those days are over.

– David