Using Free and Paid Facebook Memberships To Grow Your Business with Bella Vasta

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTIf your business depends on you being IN your business for it to run, you may want to consider the way in which your business runs. You must be able to take time off, whether it’s for a vacation or to spend time with a loved one, your business needs to be able to run without you.Facebook groups can be used as a sales funnel as often you’ll be able to buy a product that has a free membership to a broad group as a part of its benefits. From there, people may end up purchasing membership to your more exclusive and knowledgeable group.Guidelines are important, but don’t dictate as you may end up with a bad reputation.Before you start a group for your business, you need to understand your why.Planning your content and scheduling it in advance is essential to running a successful group.Use your free group to encourage members into joining you paid membership. Mention the topics you’ve covered, talk about them in the free group and show people that your paid membership is worth it.You’ll be putting more effort into this group, so showing people it’s worth their money is essential.Your Facebook icons on your website should go directly to your free Facebook group, not your Facebook page.Don’t oversell in your group. Although monetising is important, low hanging fruit is key.Consider using ‘pop-up groups’ for products and courses. These can be closed after they’ve been used and can encourage people to join your membership.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…When you run a group, whether it’s free or paid for, you need to focus on providing valuable information. If end up just talking to your members or trying to sell to them, they’ll go elsewhere for their information. Monetising can’t be the only thing you use your group for.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSIntroducing Bella Vasta – 04:00Running Your Business Without Being IN Your Business – 08:30Starting A Facebook Group (And The Mistakes Bella Made) - 14:30How Active Do You Need Be on Your Facebook Group? – 19:31Going from A Free Facebook Group to A Paid Membership - 23:50Getting People to Join Your Free Group – 28:36Using Memberships as a Community - 38:46Should A Free Facebook Group be Part of Your Strategy? – 42:50Monetising Your Facebook Group – 45:50LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEJump ConsultingBella’s TwitterJump Consulting Facebook GroupThe E-myth RevisitedAutomatic Approval Software for Facebook GroupsSocial Media Marketing WorldTranscript below Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast and I am your host Teresa Heath-Wareing. It's so good to be here with me today and as always, I really appreciate you listening. I feel like the podcast is going from strength to strength, and that can only be thanks to you, my listeners. So thank you very much and please keep sharing if you think that it's something your friends, or family, or neighbours, or anybody randomly that you've met might like. I would love it if you'd share the podcast. It would be a great help to me. Also, as it stands, this episode is going out on Christmas Eve, so I hope you're all ready for Christmas and ready to take a well deserved break. But also, I hope you've been thinking forward to the next year, and what you've got planned, and what might come up because I know I always like to spend quite a bit of time doing this and thinking about what goals I would like to achieve the following year. Anyway, on with today's podcast episode, which is an interview with the super lovely Bella Vasta.Now, I really look forward to doing this interview because Bella and I talk about Facebook groups, and I don't know enough about Facebook groups. I feel a little bit ashamed saying that as what I do for a business is social media. However, there are so many elements to social media that it's natural that some I'm going to be more confident in, and others that I don't use very often, I'm going to need a bit of help. So Facebook groups is definitely one of those areas. My first off, let me tell you about Bella. Bella Vasta is the dynamic personality behind the, One-woman Coaching Company, Jump Consulting. And since 2002, Bella has been a trailblazer in the pet sitting industry consulting with multimillion dollar companies all the way to dealing with hundreds of small businesses. She is an author, a podcast host, a blogger, and has been featured on NBC, CBS, Fox, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Huffington Post. Following the birth of her daughter, Bella sold her pet sitting business and now lives out her passion to inspire, motivate, and challenge business owners through her speaking, coaching and consulting.So Bella was a great guest to have on. She has a really interesting story that started with the birth of her very premature daughter, and how she managed to keep her business running even though she wasn't in it. Which I think is an area that we can all take something from because actually so often we are our businesses. And if something was to happen, would your business carry on if you couldn't be in it day to day? So Bella looks at that question and tells us how she managed it, how she managed to continue this very successful business. She also then takes us through Facebook groups, which like I said, I was completely fascinated by because it's an area that I need to work on, and also an area that I'm going to be introducing later on down the line. So she told us the difference in the different Facebook groups. I.e if you're going to have one for free, if you're going to have one that's closed, or one that is in conjunction with some paid product.She also talked about how to get people from one into the other through the use of as a funnel. Now, she also talked about when you should post, how you should Post, if you're going to go live, how you grow your group, and how you monetize the group with I being too salesy. She really is an expert in this field and is super passionate about it. So I don't want to take up any more of her time and I just want to hand you over to the lovely Bella Vasta. Introducing Bella Vasta So I am so super excited for today's podcast interview with the lovely Bella Vasta. Thank you so much for saying you'll be a guest today.Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.No problem at all. Now, we were introduced through the lovely Chris [inaudible 00:04:25] who was on quite a few weeks ago now, and he very kindly said that he knew you, you were friends and that I must have you on the show. I love getting recommendations, and I love meeting new People and I'm really excited about today's episode. It's going to be a good one. So the other reason I'm really excited because today we're going to look at Facebook groups, and why you should do them for your business, and how they can help your business. And this is an area I was just thinking about that I don't do a whole lot on and I don't know as much as I should, or as I want to know about it.So I'm personally, very excited about this one and I know looking at balance stuff, she's going to give us some great content, so there should be a great one. But Bella, before we get started, I have obviously been doing a bit of research, and the general social media stalking that people do, and I'd been looking around on you and I would love you to tell my audience a little bit about who you are, and how you got to what you're doing now, because you didn't necessarily start off doing this thing you're doing now. So it'd be great if you could share that with my audience.Right. Well, I think the most obvious one is that I'm across the pond, as they say. I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, which is the southwestern portion of the United States. I actually grew up on the east coast in Boston and moved to Arizona about 20 years ago, when I was in the middle of high school. And because of that, I didn't have too many friends out here when I came. I stayed at my parents house when I went into college. And they wanted to put a curfew on me, and I didn't want that because, who wants to be in college with a curfew? So when I got the opportunity to get paid to sleep over at my neighbours house to watch their dog, which was totally bizarre to me at the time, I jumped on that chance. And you know that I grew into a six figure business with multiple employees, and nationally and locally award-winning.Although, in my about fifth year of doing that, Teresa, I realised that what I really loved doing was pouring into people. People would start calling me and saying, how can I do what you do? I saw you got this award, what is this about? And I started pouring into people and realising that this coaching thing is actually a pretty cool gig. And I have developed it and it's morphed into a lot of different things. So fast forward to about 2012, I started my own couple of Facebook groups by myself. And it was really a means to an end. I saw what was out there in our industry and it wasn't really happy with the calibre of advice, or the tone, or the leadership. So I said, I'm going to start my own, which is a habitual theme throughout my own life.So I