Free Facebook Marketing Conference with SUPER Successful Marketers – with Barak Hullman

Mike: Hi there, everyone! Welcome to Episode 101 of The Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Thomas. And first off, it’s February 14th. Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone, I hope you’re not at home on your computers and you’re out, doing something with that special someone. And yet, today I have on the show Barak Hullman to talk about his Facebook Marketing Breakthrough Conference. Now, what’s that gonna be about is, it’s a totally free access conference, the only thing that you have to pay for is if you wanna get the MP3s and the transcripts and whatnot. If that’s something you’re interested, you can pay for that but everything else is free and they got speakers in it. Big name that comes to mind here is Gary Vaynerchuck, he’s a pretty big guy. Ah, Dr. Ben Adkins and among so many other, Yoel Cohen, he was on the show before, talking about Facebook. So yeah, I brought Barak up today to find out what exactly they’ll be talking about and what he learned from doing all these interviews with these people because for me, personally, Facebook is always a complicated thing. How do you do the marketing? Should you be buying promoted post? Should you be sending traffic to your website? Should you be sending it to you page? So, it’s always confusing for me and so it’s probably confusing for some of you as well. Anyways, let’s get right into it. Here is Barak.

Mike: We are here today with Barak Hullman. Barak, how are you? Barak: I’m good, thank God.
Mike: Thank God.
Barak: How are you, Mike?

Mike: I’m good, thank you. Welcome back on the show. We had you on, I think it was, we were talking before – Episode 56. Barak: Yeah, 56. It’s a good number.
Mike: And what have you been up to since then?

Barak: I’ve been putting together an online Facebook Marketing Conference. And basically what I did is I reached out to the world’s top experts in Facebook Marketing and I ask them what I should know to market on Facebook coz I knew nothing about marketing on Facebook before I started. I have tried in the past –

Mike: Let me interrupt you, let me interrupt you. When you say you know nothing about marketing on Facebook, what is your – or what was your idea of Facebook Marketing before you spoke to all of these people.

Barak: I thought it was Google AdWords. I thought Facebook, AdWords, one platform, different platform approach of the same way. So I have lots of ecommerce and affiliate sites. I tried to promote them on Facebook, just like I do with AdWords, but it didn’t work. And I think, you know, okay, Facebook has some work, you know, look at the Facebook stock, it just keeps driving down and down. I figured out, that’s why, coz it doesn’t work. Right then, I had this idea that I will start some interviewing people and see what they can tell me and see what I can learn. It totally blew me away, totally changed my perspective. Now I know what I’m doing in Facebook and I could tell you that it works.

Mike: Now, ok. So Facebook Marketing, the term Facebook Marketing, I think, is super broad because it could mean creating Facebook pages. It could be like, for example, once I, every time I publish an interview, I go and I share it on my personal Facebook page. I also share it in my MikeFromMaine Facebook page. And there’s an option there where I can do a promoted post and I can pay, I think, what is it, like 5 bucks and I can have it sent out to a specific amount of people. And by sent out, I mean, it’s gonna pop up on that person’s feed, like when you open up your Facebook, it’s gonna come up on that little feed there, which it won’t come up on everyone’s if I don’t have, if I don’t pay for it. But of course, these people have to be subscribed to MikeFromMaine. So, let’s say, right now, I have 391 people on there and if I pay 5 bucks, they will go and be shown to them and I think it will also go and be shown to their friends as well. So –

Barak: It’s not gonna be shown to everyone. Mike: Yeah.

Barak: It’s not gonna be shown to everyone. It’s only gonna be shown to people that Facebook determines as gonna click on that ad. So, I’m not exactly sure coz I’m not one of the experts. I interviewed the experts, I learned a lot. And so, I’m not exactly sure how it works but I know that – to answer what you said before about Facebook Marketing and it seems like a general survey, it actually isn’t. It’s actually something very focused. Basically, what we’re doing is we’re building some type of community and I’m talking about it from a business point of view. So, we’re building a community based on a product or a brand. And then, we’re gonna add some content that we hope will go viral. That will be nice if it goes viral but Facebook wants you to pay. They need to make money. So, it used to be a year ago. This is what everyone that I interviewed was telling me. A year ago, organic viral, you could do the whole business like that. Now, you’re gonna have to pay for it. Now, things have changed. And so, you’re building, you’re building this community page, and then you’re paying to send traffic to it on Facebook but you’re sending very focused, targeted traffic. Otherwise, it won’t work. But if you have a low click- through rate on your ads, Facebook’s gonna stop showing them unless you pay a lot of money. The only way to get a low click-through rate is to be very focused. So, let’s say, people wrote under profile, I like Mike from Maine. And you targeted people that mentioned Mike from Maine and everything has Mike from Maine, that will probably work really well. So, we could do it for something a little bigger. We could do it for social media examiner, for example. We’re all Facebook. We’re inside Facebook if I’m marketing my conference. So I would target people that liked those pages and then, I know that I’m getting people that are interested in what I’m, what I’m promoting. But then, people are talking about getting, like 0.17% or something like that, not even close to 1% click-through rate. I have now a 7 or 8% click-through rate on my Facebook ads which is unheard of. And it’s just because I understand this content that it has to be focused, focused, focused.

Mike: Okay, so I interrupted you before. I want you to continue on and, let’s have you tell everyone what exactly the Facebook Marketing Breakthrough is.

Barak: Okay, so Facebook Marketing Breakthrough, like what I was saying before, that I have a lot of experience of internet marketing. I have been doing this for many years and I felt like Facebook was something that I ignored coz it didn’t work and I didn’t understand it. And I just felt like many times, I was only throwing money out there and nothing has happened. So, I interviewed these people and one interview after another, people are mentioning similar concepts. It’s actually a very limited field. There’s not that much to learn about Facebook Marketing, at least at this point. And so people were pretty much repeating the same stuff. As I went through the interview, I started getting it. And it’s exactly what I just said before, that’s if I wanna boil it down, that’s what it is. You’re building a focused community based around a product or a brand and you’re sending targeted traffic to it. You’re trying to put posts that you hope will go viral, so you don’t have to pay for it. And then, there’s all kinds of tricks that you can learn from people of the Warrior Forum, things like that. I did interview Ben Adkins, I interviewed Yoel Cohen. I interviewed people from the forum but everyone else is off the forum. And it was interesting to see the different perspective because they guys on the forum, they’re gorilla marketers. They just wanna know how to build a community super fast, how do I build a list off for Facebook, how do I make money. And everyone else that I talk to they were either authors of famous books, you know, best-selling books. Or they worked for agencies and they all work with these big multi-national corporations, totally different perspective than the gorilla guys.

Mike: Yeah, sounds like the gorilla guys are more focused on the quick buck or just completely getting it and monetizing it.

Barak: Right. And the other guys are interested in selling a long-term contract and making their clients happy. It’s a totally different goals.

Mike: And I think that’s really important, especially when people are going about making a Facebook campaign, is you need to have a specific goal in mind when you go about it, because like you said, some people are gonna teach you how to build a community with the thought of, okay you wanna build brand awareness or you, I mean, not necessarily gonna be directly monetizing that where there’s people like in the Warrior Forum, they’re gonna wanna build that list and have that add to up and see the return to the investment immediately. They wanna see that person come in or they wanna see an email submit or they wanna see a sale. They wanna see that return on investment, I think faster than maybe these other people, the other group.

Barak: The people, the different people that I interviewed had different purposes. Somebody like Terry Marshall, he is a well-known name, best-selling publisher. He shared some great ideas but he doesn’t do the marketing himself. He’s got a team, I don’t know how many people are working for him, I have to go through three different secretaries just to get hold of him. So, he’s got at least three secretaries working there. And you know, he works with another author. He builds the concept around it. He’s not actually doing it. And some of the agency people that I spoke with, they are the head of the agencies. So, they’re the head. They’re the head of the octopus. They’re not the tentacles going out. Then, the one shop, you know, the one-person band that I spoke with, the gorilla marketers, they’re doing everything pretty much. So, it’s a different perspective.

Mike: What’s one or two things that you learned while doing this, that were the most surprising for you or the most beneficial, you think, for our audience?

Barak: You know, I’m just gonna keep coming back to same thing because that’s – you can, people could talk for hours and hours and hours and not say anything. But this was the bottom line and this was what started working for me, is you have to constantly make that connection of target, target, target. You have to build a fan page. They’re all kinds of things that you could promote. I didn’t understand this at first. I thought, whether it’s a profile, should I build a group, which should I be building. You build a fan page for your business. That’s the first place to start with whatever it is that you’re promoting. And for some people listening to this, they’re gonna be like, what are you an idiot? Everybody knows that. But I didn’t know that coz I was placed with, there’s all these options in front of me and I was like, what do I press? What do I do? I don’t understand this. Now, it’s the first thing. And then you build it on a specific brand. So, let’s say Facebook Marketing Breakthrough which is what we’re talking about. And so, I built a fan page for that. And then, there’s like every step here. So, you have to put the cover photo. When you build a fan page, it doesn’t come with a cover photo. You gotta make something, you gotta know to upload it. There’s lots of little things on Facebook that if you don’t know about it, you’re just gonna mess up. They’re like tiny gray buttons, and I’m like, oh you can schedule a post? And you can do this and you can do all kinds of different things that I had no idea about. So you build a fan page, you have to put up some type of cover photo. Make it look professional. Start putting up some content, something that you think will go viral. So, in the interviews, Dennis Yu was one of the best interviews and in the beginning he didn’t wanna share, he didn’t wanna share his ah, do the video with me. So, what’s going on? He said, “Well, I’m in a hotel room and my hair is a mess.” I said, just put some gel on your hair and get on the video. It’s what he did and said, “You know, I’d really rather share my screen”. And he shared his screen and he showed unbelievable stuff. Really, he shared so much. So, he was showing how to send targeted traffic to that page and it was really from him that I learned all of this stuff. So once you’ve got the page and you’ve got it based on Facebook Marketing Breakthrough, then you have to find people that are really interested in Facebook Marketing and just Facebook Marketing. You can do social media but you want like somebody who’s says their social media manager. You wanna keep it very focused. You’ve gotta get it bigger than a few hundred people. You wanna get it to maybe 10,000 to a few 100,000 people. But it always has to be focused and that’s the thing that people don’t get. They just wanna like get this big audience. And that’s not the point, we wanna get it focused, focused, focused.

Mike: Okay, right now, I’m looking at facebook.com/facebsummit. Those of you watching, you can go open a link to this underneath the video. Um, talk to me about how after you’ve spoken to all these people and then you went create this page. Talk to me about this page. Tell me what you’ve done to it, how you’re marketing it.

Barak: Just a sec, I’m gonna bring up the page as well.
Mike: Bring it up.
Barak: One second.
Mike: This wasn’t – this wasn’t pre-planned. I’m catching Barak off guard. Barak: Yeah, you are. Okay, hold on a second.

Mike: Yeah, coz I mean, I’m looking at this, I see it’s got 230 likes so far. There’s 161 people talking about it. I’m gonna go ahead and like it. There you go.

Barak: Oh, thank you.

Mike: You’re welcome.

Barak: It’s up here. Ok, it just came up. Ok, so what do you wanna know about it? What can I tell you about it?

Mike: I don’t know. I just — are you, right now, are you marketing this through sponsored ads? Are you paying for any marketing right now?

Barak: Yes. Yeah, you have to. That’s a big thing that – Mike: Why do you do it?

Barak: That’s a big thing that everybody said. A year ago, you could do this without paying for ads. Facebook changed Ad Rank in order to force you basically to pay to get traffic.

Mike: And Ad Rank is the algorithm that they use to rank the content, kinda like the Google algorithm.

Barak: Yeah, just brand your content around. One of the people that I interviewed, he said to me that if you post, I think it was once a day, only 16% of the people, in your – like of your friends are gonna see what you post. So you would think, hey I post something, all my friends are gonna see it. That’s not how it is because Facebook is trying to figure out what are your friends gonna interact with. Interaction is super important. So, when you post something it has to be something that people will react with. So, for example, I posted a picture of how to never give up on the fan page, on the Facebook Marketing Breakthrough. And it started going somewhat viral. I actually found this on another, I think it was one of the warrior JV pages or something like that. And somebody posted the link. I went to the original link and I reposted it on my page and that’s something that people like. So, that’s something that would go viral.

Mike: I see that ten people have liked it so far.

Barak: Ten people, yeah. I can see the statistics on my page over here. And 182 people saw the post. And it’s not coming up very fast over here.

Mike: Did you promote – sorry to interrupt, did you promote that specific one? Did you pay to promote that image?

Barak: No. There was one post that I did pay to promote. That’s the one that I highlighted and tagged at the top here. That’s the pictures of all the people that I interviewed. So, that’s that I’m paying for.

Mike: And you’ve gone 234 likes. That’s great.

Barak: Right, right. And that’s really cheap. I’m paying now 3 cents a click for that because that’s getting the 8% click-through rate, coz I’m targeting people that really want to see these interviews. It’s something, they either go to conferences, that’s another thing. I target people that go to the conferences that these people speak at. Or that they have mentioned that they like books or that liked their companies. So, it’s people that know these people and they want to hear more information. And a lot of these people, there aren’t any interviews out there. They either speak in conferences and they are not recorded. Or if you get on Youtube, you can find, maybe, like a 5-minute, you know, get together with these person but there’s no real hardcore interview with these people. And there are people that follow them and they wanna see the interviews. So that’s what I’m talking about: targeted, targeted, targeted. Everything has got to be that targeted. This picture also went somewhat viral.

Mike: Yeah, it’s – it’s got 19 shares, 134 likes, a few comments in there.

Barak: Okay, it’s not gonna go as viral as something like pit bulls or I don’t know the names of these dogs but all the gorilla guys that I spoke with they all have a dog page or a cigar page or something that’s related to some very passionate niche. So, Facebook Marketing is not a passionate niche. It’s things, it’s something that people wanna know about, but they’re not passionate about their dog. You know, Facebook Marketing like they are their dog. So, that’s a take of totally different thing. That’s what a lot of the gorilla guys are talking about.

Mike: Why did you decide to initially give this whole course or this conference away for free?

Barak: Ah, well, this is following the model of The Winter of Wellness. Something that I mentioned before and this is, The Winter of Wellness is three-month video – ah, they just do audio, they call it Telesummit. And they’re interviewing all these well-known people and their sharing their expertise and new age and health and I figured, okay, I’m not into that. Well, I learned this from my wife. She’s into it. And in fact, I figured out bringing it to a topic, something related to internet marketing, something that I want to learn more about. Facebook is this huge thing and I felt like I didn’t have enough education, I didn’t know what I was talking about and here’s a great way for me to learn more and to share it with everybody. And I really don’t know what’s gonna happen with it. I just put it out there. And we’ll see. My friends is hitting me, “So, how are you gonna make money from this?” So, I have some ideas for making money, but I don’t know how much money it’s gonna make. The interviews are done. The content is great. It’s out there for free. And we’ll see what happens.

Mike: I’m interested in that, what are your, what are your monetization plans? What’s in your head?

Barak: Ah so, I always got ideas. Ok, so first of all, you’re building a list from this. So, there’re always Facebook products to market to the list. There are membership sites, you could create a membership site. I don’t know, it can be $7 a month, it can be $47 a month. You could bring in people and interview them. You could take products and say, “Look, I’m gonna give you the essence of these products. Every month, I’m gonna summarize all this material for you. So, you don’t have to bother. I’ll put in a 15-minute package and you pay for it every month.” There’s a paid upgrade to download the video, to download video files and summaries of the interviews. So for somebody, you know, it’s a lot of content, it’s at least eight hours of interviews. And if you don’t have the patience

to take notes, you’re not gonna remember everything. I have it all written down, but not transcribed. It’s actually summarized, so it’s condensed, like the main points. And who knows, you know, I am already thinking about the next conference that I’m gonna do. I’m working on more with my wife now. We’re gonna do a parenting conference. So, that’s a totally different niche but I’m using all the skills that I learned from here. All the technical skills, all the marketing skills and it’s pretty easy to target parents on Facebook. And it’s also something that’s really easy to make viral because you can do a giveaway, for example, on Facebook. There are these viral aps. It’s something that I actually learn about – all the really good stuff I learned about from people that aren’t, ah, well-known names. The well-known names, they gave me the general education and they brought me up to speed. And then, once you’re really in the thick of it, you start contacting people on it, I see. I think there was a guy who had 70,000 likes on his page within five weeks.

Mike: Wow.

Barak: And he’s not one of the Warrior Forum guys, you know. These Warrior Forum guys, like I told you, they got a passionate niche. They got the pit bulls. And people are crazy about this and they got a million likes on it. Forget about that. Let me talk with somebody who’s not on the Warrior Forum. The system, how do you do it. He said, I have a viral ap. He went to CodeCanyon, it’s just a side where you can buy all kinds of little applications. And he bought something to some guy from lafia road, I don’t know. I actually bought it. I think it was $18. It’s a little not well-written PHP script, it’s a total mess, if you don’t know what you’re doing, programming-wise. But once you get it set up, you basically put a tab on your Facebook fan page. And this guy had start here. So, you come to the page. He runs this ah, magazine of like fashion and something that’s mainly for women.

Mike: Okay.

Barak: And so, you come to the page and it says, start here. So you click on it. And it brings you to an external page where it just says, we’re giving away this makeup set click here to log into Facebook to register for the raffle or something like that, or for the lottery, whatever it is. Now, when you click on it, some people will realize this, it must be put down. You’re giving the ap, you’re giving it permission to post in your page and to send it off to all your friends. And so, once you do that, it’s sending off a message to all of your friends. I just registered for this free make-up set, click here to get yours. But whatever message you wanna put in there, you click on it and it brings you there and it sends it off to all their friends. And that’s the viral ap. it goes viral and viral and viral. And if it’s women, they want the makeup and they’re sending it to other friends who want the makeup and it just keeps going.

Mike: It’s kinda like Contest Domination.

Barak: Ah, I’m not familiar with it.

Mike: Yeah, I mean. There are things up there that you could buy. I just did an interview with Wilco de Kreij, he’s got a, like a Facebook, what was it, something for Facebook. WP for Facebook where you can build Facebook pages within your WordPress and you can then put that right on your Facebook page. You can customize exactly how you want it to be. So, yeah, those things are super powerful.

Barak: It’s just this viral concept, you know. You’re basically giving away, giving away, giving away and then he is building a list from it.

Mike: So how much – go ahead, Barak.
Barak: This guy said to me, I don’t know what to do with my list. This was the greatest thing. So, I have something to do with this list.

Mike: When people wanna finally give you money, ah, how much, how much are you gonna charge for all that transcript and stuff? Have you decided on a price yet?

Barak: Yeah. I have decided on $197 and we’ll see. I don’t know if that’s gonna go over well. It just depends on the audience. I’m not sure. I’m sure people from the Warrior Forum are not gonna pay $197 but I’m basically targeting people that are off the Warrior Forum. And these people that work for big corporations and things like that, it must be something that they’ll pay for.

Mike: I think people, I like, I agree with you, people that are probably coming from the Warrior Forum, that’s gonna be a higher price point for them that they’re not used to. They’re used to buying products that are $7 to like $27. But people that maybe coming from this non-Facebook audiences, they’re gonna be used to paying for higher value and higher priced products. So yeah, you might strike it there.

Barak: Sure. There are online conferences. They’re charging $1000 a ticket. And a lot of these people speak at those conferences. And most likely, the content is not gonna be as good as what you’d get out of an interview coz it’s packaged. They made their talk, they stand in front of the audience. This is what you need to know, it’s all on my book. But when I talk with them I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. So, let’s say, this is what you need to do. And I say, how do you do that? And they’ll tell me how they do it but I say, I do not understand, how do you do that? And we just keep going until there’s nothing more. I always ask them the end. So, is there anything that I should have asked you but I didn’t? Something that you wanna tell me that I should have asked you in this interview; no, that’s it. You asked me everything, I can’t think of anything else to say. So, you’re not gonna get that in a conference.

Mike: Barak, is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven’t?

Barak: It’s a terrible question, you know. Coz you just wanna say, no, I said everything I have to say. Now, I know I better not ask that question.

Mike: What I usually say to people is, I say, is there anything, before we wrapped it up, is there anything else that you wanna mention and it gives the guy the opportunity to promote something if they wanna promote their website or whatever.

Barak: That’s a good question.

Mike: So, I’m gonna ask you that one, Barak.

Barak: Okay.

Mike: Is there anything that you like to mention before we wrap it up?

Barak: I like to mention, of course, Facebook Marketing Breakthrough, that’s fbbreakthrough.com. It’s free content. All the interviews are gonna be up for 7 days for free, then they’d go behind a paid wall. And, take advantage of it.

Mike: Cool. Thank you very much for coming out.

Barak: Yeah. Thank you, Mike.

Mike: I hope you enjoy the interview today with Barak. Make sure you go to mikefrommaine.com/facebookmarketing and that will bring you right to Barak’s conference where you can sign up to get all those free interviews with Facebook experts. As always, thanks for watching. And I’ll see you tomorrow.