How to Make Money From Facebook Groups: The ULTIMATE Guide to Monetization

This guide is all about how to make money from Facebook groups you manage. As an aside, I read every decent one on the internet while researching this post, and can confirm that this is the most comprehensive guide on Facebook group monetization that you’ll find.

(If you think we’ve overlooked something here, please let us know in the comments section.)

Want 1-on-1 help monetizing your Facebook group? We offer 1-hour consulting sessions that you can book with me directly via this link – we can cover A LOT with one call, and help you start generating cash from your group immediately.

It makes sense – TCF is a digital marketing agency that represents national brands. My employees and I know what things look like from the brand perspective, because we often look for these types of opportunities on behalf of our clients. In this case, the opportunities that brands are starting to see in Facebook groups translate to big opportunities for the people who manage them.

So, You Admin a Popular Facebook Group…

First, let me make it clear that this guide is written for people who already manage large Facebook groups (figure 5,000+ members as a minimum, but there are some exceptions). We’ll write a separate guide on how to build and grow a successful Facebook group later – this one is all about monetization, for the admins of groups that have a lot of members.

There are several tips and tricks here that aren’t covered anywhere else, and my team and I are psyched to share this info with you – we see you out there, slaying it as admins! Thanks for all that you do – we get great value out of the groups we love…even if we won’t mention them by name in this post (side-eye and subtle head nod to our favorite tag groups).

High five on creating a successful group. We know it isn’t easy, and moderating takes a lot of effort – and probably gets you a lot of angry messages. Being the admin of a large Facebook group is hard and often weird work, as I’m sure you already know.

Did you know there are tools you can use to make your adminning process easier, more efficient, and faster to monetize?

Step 1: Get Group Leads

Are you using your Facebook group to create an email list that you can market to on an ongoing basis? No? CHANGE THAT, ASAP.

You should be talking to your group members outside of your Facebook group, for a variety of reasons. First, Facebook's algorithm can change at any point – this happened to Facebook pages, and all of a sudden the overall reach went to basically nothing.

Second, your group could get "Zucced" at any point. If you make a post that makes your members angry and they report you, your group could get shut down without warning. And all that hard work you put into building your community? Wasted.

Shifting your members over to becoming email subscribers is how you can mitigate these potential risks. And guess what? Group Leads does this automatically. As people request to join your group and provide their email address in the "answer these questions" section, Group Leads will add them to your email list and then send them a welcome email right away.

This is a HUGE component of monetizing your list. You can't just build the email list, you've gotta communicate with them upon joining. Group Leads makes this easy and automatic, and it's GDPR compliant.

Group Leadswill also auto-approve potential members based on the parameters you set. Want potential members to answer your membership approval questions? If they don't, Group Leads will auto deny them. Want to create a femme-only space, like Sisters in SEO? Group Leads enables that functionality as well.

Essentially, Group Leads can save you hundreds of hours each year on the screening, approval and lead capturing processes.

It'll do everything but make you breakfast in the morning, and if you admin a large Facebook group it's an absolute must-have. Plus, you pay once and get lifetime access (so there are no recurring monthly fees, it's a one-and-done thing that works for all the groups you manage). Check out this affiliate link to get the best deal on Group Leads, and then come back here and comment about all the time it's saved you.

Once you've signed up for this, monetization is pretty easy and automatic. But even if you don't join Group Leads, you can still make money off of your members – even if you're a total newbie at this kind of thing.

Monetizing your Facebook group may seem even like a real challenge, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience. It may feel like it’s too much to even start to get into.

It’s not. You can pick any path here and make money from Facebook groups in a very short period of time with both advertising and affiliate partners:

TL;DR note for this guide: if you’re short on time and headspace, skip to the last section (How to Monetize Your Facebook Group, FAST) and pay attention to the press kit/rate card paragraphs right above it as well.

For a more holistic approach that will also help you turn your Facebook group into a passive revenue stream, follow the whole guide and join our Facebook group on Facebook group monetization (yo, dawg...I heard you like Facebook groups). We also use the group to facilitate free mastermind sessions on making money with Facebook groups, conducted via the groups (we have recorded trainings you can check out).

Now, let’s turn your Facebook group into a money making machine! But first…

What makes your Facebook group attractive to brand sponsors?

There are hundreds of millions of different groups on Facebook, and some are easier to monetize than others. It basically comes down to your niche and targeting, with a side of, “how big is your group?” (More on that below.)

Potential advertising and sponsorship partners are going to want to see an engaged group of people who closely – or better yet, exactly – resemble their target audience. This is why your audience targeting is so important, so pay attention to it as you continue to build your group.

What potential advertising and sponsorship partners don’t want to want to see is a lot of noise or spam in the group. This signals to the marketing managers that the spam and noise is going to drown out their message, which makes your Facebook group look like a less attractive venue for ad and marketing dollars.

Also, crappy spammy posting devalues your group in general. It’s very important that you to monitor and regulate what’s posted in your group if you’re trying to get money out of it.

Keep Your Group’s Content High Quality & On Target

If you’re not already ruling your Facebook group throne with an iron fist, consider upgrading your modding standards. As the admin of a high-quality group, you should be focused on delivering value to your group members. This means keeping posts limited to those that provide value or are of actual interest to members.

Potential brand partners are also going to want to see a lot of engagement on the posts. How many posts per day are there? How many comments and likes?

More is not necessarily more here.

If the number of posts per day is too high, it’s unlikely that the brand’s message will be heard. This can be worked around, with packages that include multiple posts (and announcements!), as well as the promise to pin a post for a set amount of time.

Believe it or not, it’s even possible to monetize tag groups. If you’ve got a tag group for memes with 750k members, the audience isn’t very targeted and therefore not as attractive to brands. However, if that tag group is That’s It, I’m Nail Shaming, you’ve got a real shot at getting sponsorship from nail and beauty companies.

The bottom line: if your group members all have a particular interest in common, chances are you can monetize. Groups around professional interests and skill sharing, hobbies, travel, cute photos of pets (I’m sure there’s a dog toy company interested in that target audience)…just about any large Facebook group can be monetized, as long as the target demographic is clear.

How big does your Facebook group need to be to make money?

The short answer is, it depends on your group’s niche. The minimum Facebook group size that would attract a brand partner for sponsorship is probably in the neighborhood of 10,000 members or more, but if your audience is highly targeted and the dollar value of the widgets you’re selling to them is high enough, 3,000-5,000 may be enough.

If your group has 100,000 members or more and is highly targeted (your members all share a similar interest, which can be marketed to), you should have no problem turning your Facebook group into a well-oiled money making machine.

As the owner of a large Facebook group, here’s something that you should know about brands:

It doesn’t matter how many Facebook likes the brand page has, the struggle to reach those people who liked the page all those years ago is real. I know, because my team is out here on that grind for clients every day.

Thanks to Facebook’s algorithm updates, brands just don’t get the page reach they used to. This means that if brands want their posts to show up in the news feeds of the people who like their page, they need to pay for it.

Aside from retargeting traffic via Facebook pixels, Facebook’s ad targeting is less than stellar and requires a lot of A/B testing to get right. This A/B testing is expensive, and marketing agencies are often shooting darts in the dark at target audiences until you hit on something with a lower cost per click than the others.

Some brands are starting to get into the Facebook group game, but it can be a long road to growth (as you may know!) and quite frankly, a lot of professional social media marketers don’t have the budget, time or savvy to effectively grow groups for their clients.

This makes your large Facebook group, which is already well targeted and has tons of members, extra attractive to marketers like me.

Another important note: there is currently no way for brands to directly target members of particular Facebook groups with ads.

That ad targeting functionality just doesn’t exist, period. You can post links in groups, and those links can have Facebook pixels on them that will enable retargeting later. That’s just for the members of the group who saw the link and clicked it, though. It’s definitely not the same thing as directly targeting the group with Facebook ads.

This means that if a brand wants to advertise to a particular Facebook group, it needs to strike a deal with the administrator of that Facebook group directly. Oh hey, that’s you!

Believe it or not, brands will be PUMPED at the possibility of paying you to get in front of your highly targeted audience that heavily overlaps with their own. But how do you find these brand partners, so you can make money from Facebook groups that you manage?

It’s definitely not a Field of Dreams situation, where if you build it they will come. You need to ask the right people, make sure you (and your group) is visible to marketing managers, and have a clear offer and ask.

We’ll get to that in the must-read section about press kits below, but first you need to set yourself up for success.

Here’s what you need to do to make your Facebook group more attractive to advertisers, sponsors and potential affiliate partners:

How to Prepare to Make Money from Facebook Groups You Admin

This can get complex, and this section could probably be 5-10 separate posts – we’ll try to get to creating those individual guides soon. In the meantime, here’s a high-level overview of what you should be doing in order to monetize your Facebook group(s) to the fullest extent possible.

Sure, you can sell some sponsored posts and move some product for affiliate partners – but you shouldn’t limit yourself to those two options when it comes to making money from Facebook groups. If you’re going to monetize your Facebook page and accept ad money from brands, you should treat your group like the business that it is.

And, if you do that, you may actually be able to sell this business at some point. Depending on your group’s membership, it’s entirely possible that a brand will offer to buy your Facebook group (as of now, it looks like that doesn't violate their TOS). If that’s the goal, you need to start making it as attractive as possible to potential buyers now.

Here’s what you should be doing, if you’re looking to make money with your Facebook groups long-term:

1. Build a website rich with content that delivers value.

Tag groups aside, just about every large Facebook group should also have a similarly-branded website with content establishing who your target audience is and the value your brand delivers to them.

You should have an “about” page explaining your group and its mission/target audience, plus a media page where you list any press coverage you’ve received (more on how to get that media coverage below). Ask group members to write guest posts related to your target audience, build out that content yourself, etc.

Be sure to set up Facebook tracking pixels on your site, so you can remarket to the people who have been on your website (this can help you grow the group even faster, and provide more value to brand partners since you’ll also be able to offer remarketing services).

2. Create a series of downloadable assets.

This will help you build a large list of email subscribers you can continue to reach out to over time. Email marketing can have a HUGE impact on your ability to deliver sales for brand partners (and make more money for yourself in the process).

You want to develop a large email list, because it’s going to attract more brand partners – and you’ll get paid significantly more as a result of your increased reach. Build your email list by creating downloadable assets that people actually want (think guides, checklists, lists of resources, etc.), which you will provide to them for free if they join your email list…so you can sell them stuff later.

Email marketing is a beast in and of itself, but if you want to make the most money from your Facebook group (and your brand partners’ target audience), we recommend that you invest in it early. A year from now, you’ll wish you’d have started today – trust us here.

3. Learn SEO, create content and generate organic traffic.

(You'll also gain more Facebook group members.)

Think of your Facebook group as a content marketing machine – that’s how your advertising and affiliate partners are looking at it, so you might as well leverage it for yourself too.

We have a ton of great guides on our blog that will teach you a lot of what you need to know about SEO – from keyword research to writing content that ranks well.

If you want more comprehensive training, we have a complete online SEO training course that will take you from 0 to 60 for $349 (or, you can get the same training manual I use to teach employees SEO and DIY here).

Here’s why SEO is so important: if you do it right, it’ll turn into a huge passive revenue stream – especially when it comes to affiliate deals. If you’re really going to slay the affiliate game, it’s not enough to just get traffic to your website, you’re going to want to get the right kind of traffic.Specifically, you need highly targeted traffic that is already primed to convert.

Also, if you can get your Alexa ranking down below 1 million, PR reps will salivate for the chance to get mentions, articles, backlinks, etc., placed on your website. This will qualify you to send HARO queries (and get free stuff/introductions to brands in your space).Trust us – having a bunch of PR reps who are anxious to get on your radar can be a very good (and profitable) situation for you. Why leave that money on the table?

Here’s something else you should know, from our perspective (as digital marketers representing a potential brand partner): the client (we) will ask if you have a website – and we’re going to want to see your site traffic numbers.

If you don’t have a website, or have one with low traffic, it won’t necessarily derail a Facebook advertising deal if your group has a lot of engaged members. However, if you’re looking to make the most money from Facebook groups that you manage, you should build out a larger platform than just the Facebook group. Zuckerberg can change that algorithm at any time!

The bottom line: SEO will help show that you not only have a large Facebook group worth marketing to, but also highly targeted site traffic brand partners can also get value from. And it’ll drive affiliate sales, plus introduce more people to your Facebook group. Wins all around.

"#SEO shows brand partners you have highly targeted site traffic in addition to a #Facebook group worth marketing to. #SMM" - The Content Factory

4. Generate media coverage for your Facebook group.

In the process, you’ll also develop backlinks for referral traffic and SEO. This is super easy to do with HARO – look at what you can do in 30 days, and it’s 100% free. Familiarize yourself with HARO, and read this pitching guide. It’s a numbers game, but if you stick with it you’ll get media coverage you can point to forever (your family will be so proud!).

5. Create a press kit.

What should your Facebook group press kit include?

• Your Facebook group stats
• Demographic/basic info about the members of your group
• Website traffic stats
• Email subscription numbers
• A rate card outlining the sponsorship and ad packages you offer
• Case studies from past partnerships

Creating this press kit is last in this list, but not least – you’ll be able to close a lot more sponsorship and advertising deals if you have a spiffy looking press kit. We’ll even go so far as to say you’ll be able to charge more, since it’ll look like you’re “in the game” and “brand friendly” (act like you’ve been here before, even if you haven’t).

"You’ll close a more sponsorship deals for your #Facebook group if you have a spiffy looking press kit. #SMM" - The Content Factory

You also need to create a list of packages and prices. Typically, brands are looking for an ongoing relationship if the partnership works, and we’d recommend the minimum package be for three posts spread out over a week or so.

Come up with some package options for sponsored posts, and put a price tag on it based on your group size/reach/influence. Make it clear that you’re open to ideas from the brand partners, as well.

As you generate case studies showing your sponsored deals/affiliate promotions work well, update your press kit to include all that info – marketing managers over on the brand side of things want to see a proven track record, and your press kit is where you want to display that information. Intimidated by the design aspect? Don’t be – Proposify makes it simple (and it’s what we use for our proposals at TCF.)

"Intimidated by designing a great press kit? Don’t be – @Proposify makes it simple! #marketing" - The Content Factory

6. Build your email list

As mentioned at the top of this post, you should NOT rely on Facebook to be a benevolent source of revenue forever. Anything can change at any point, which is why you should migrate your members to other spaces where you can market to them.

Like, for instance, email. Email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of 37:1. That's higher than social media marketing, and just about any other digital marketing tactic.

This means you should be building your email list and email marketing system – advertisers are going to want in on it! You can also use affiliate partnerships to monetize your email list, which will pull double duty on the income generating front.

Group Leads is the fastest and easiest way to automatically build your list, and they have some killer case studies you'll want to check out. They also have a Facebook group, naturally, which helps GF users optimize their monetization strategies.

Need help? Contact us and we’ll help you through the process.

How to Monetize Your Facebook Group FAST

This section is where the big (and quick) money is. If you’ve got a large Facebook group with a targeted audience, it should be no problem for you to find affiliate partnerships that you can start generating income from right away.

One thing you should know about making money from Facebook groups via affiliate and advertising relationships: you absolutely need to disclose every time you’re promoting a product or service that is paying you to do so (even if it’s just a percentage on the back end).

This is a very, very big deal. Every time you make a sponsored post or link to an affiliate, you need to disclose that it’s an ad, sponsored post, or an affiliate link. Not doing this can get you in BIG trouble and jeopardize the trust of your members.

Always, always disclose when a post is sponsored or you’re promoting a product or service that you have an affiliate relationship with. This is also true if you receive product in exchange for a review.

Affiliate Marketing for Facebook Groups

If you’re not already familiar with the term “affiliate marketing,” this Forbes guide will tell you a lot of what you need to know. Long story short, there’s a ton of money to be made with affiliate partnerships.

For instance, BetterHelp is such a good affiliate that I partner with them for the Workationing brand – every time somebody signs up for a free week of internet therapy and stays on past the trial period, we get $300 (click the affiliate link for more info).

At TCF, we have an affiliate relationship with SEMrush that pays 40% of subscriptions that stay on past the 7-day trial period. Using SEO techniques we get a lot of website traffic interested in SEO tools, so it monetizes our site traffic in a completely passive way. People sign up, stay on, and we get paid.

On the other hand, TCF and Workationing both have online training courses in digital marketing and digital nomad-ism that also have affiliate programs. For every course of ours that an affiliate partner sells, the person who buys it gets $50 off and the affiliate partner also gets $50.

Interested in learning more about our affiliate program for your Facebook group? Contact us for more info.

Search for affiliate programs that have attractive deals, and experiment with promoting the services/products/courses to your clients. Search for “your industry/group interest” + "affiliate” and see what comes up – there are huge lists of affiliates for just about every industry.

"#SMM tip: search for ''your industry/group interest'' + ''affiliate'' to find #affiliate partnerships for your Facebook group." - The Content Factory

Amazon Affiliate Marketing for Facebook Groups

Who doesn’t buy stuff on Amazon? Amazon has a killer affiliate setup that will get you 1-10% of all sales you make, depending on product category. This allows you to promote different products to your Facebook group and get a cut of every sale you help generate.

Chances are good that a lot of services and tools that you use have some sort of affiliate program – you just gotta ask or check their website. This is an excellent gig for a virtual assistant, by the way.

In addition to the traditional (or is it newfangled?) affiliate relationships, you can also look into CPA (cost per action) deals. For example, if a company is looking for survey responses and you promote it to the group, the company will pay a set amount for every survey completed by your group members. These are likely to yield less of a return in most cases, unless members of your group are highly engaged.

OfferVault also has a big list of companies that offer affiliate deals, which you may want to check out.

Decide What to Charge for Ads in Your Facebook Group

Marketing affiliate products and services to members of your Facebook group is one way to generate money, but you can also work directly with brands. If you’ve ever seen #spon on Instagram or “sponsored post” on Facebook, you know what I’m talking about.

If you’ve got a large Facebook group with a targeted audience, you’re what we in the industry like to call “an influencer.” You may not be Kylie Jenner, but you’ve got an audience and odds are some marketing type wants that audience of yours to know about their brand.

You should position yourself as an influencer in your press kit, too. If your group is big enough, there’s no doubt that you’re an influencer in your space – you might as well claim it, so you can reap the rewards.

To get an idea of what posts in your group might be worth to advertisers, hook up your social media accounts to Social Bluebook. It’ll give you a rough estimate of what you could be charging for posts, but those aren’t hard numbers to live by. It also serves as a platform to introduce you to potential brand partners.

There are other calculators available online that will help you figure out the value of your social media following across a variety of channels (see this post and this article). Again, any numbers these calculators come up with are largely arbitrary – but again, it’ll give you a baseline.

As far as putting a price tag on it, see what the brand will offer. Get a couple of baselines after a couple of deals, GET CASE STUDIES from successful campaigns and raise your rates along the way accordingly.

Marketing managers or agency reps will tell you if you’re charging too much. If so, ask what they’re willing to pay and consider negotiating. Either way you win, because you’ll get a better idea of what you can charge to make sponsored posts in your group.

Remember: the advertiser needs to get value out of the deal, or they won’t keep sending you checks for promoting their brand.

Find Sponsors & Advertisers for Your Facebook Group

Okay, so you’re ready to get your #spon on…now what? Facebook groups are still new technology to a lot of marketers, and many still fail to see the full potential in leveraging the group admins as influencers for their brand.

This means you need to convey that value in your press kit. What kind of reach do your posts get? How much engagement? What’s the response been to other sponsored posts? Etc.

Convince the marketing manager (us, over here at the agency side of things) that their ad investment in your group is going to be a good one. Work with them to find advertising options that everyone is happy with, and keep that relationship friendly so they want to come back.

If you’ve never run a sponsored post campaign for a brand before, don’t worry. You’re just going to need to research, then reach out.

What brands and services do you use and love? What can members of your group get value out of? This will give you an idea of what your group members may be interested in (and receptive to).

Contact these companies, send them your press kit, and let them know that you’re brand-friendly and ready to expose your group members (who happen to be their target audience) to their products and services with sponsored posts.

You can even take things to the next level by having a VA do the researching for you, and maybe even send a template outreach email. At the same time, like the brands’ Facebook pages as your page, and send them a message that you’re interested in partnering.

Sell Your Own Products & Services to Your Facebook Group

While we’re talking about how to make money from Facebook groups, we would be remiss in our duties as digital marketers if we didn’t tell you that you should also be building out your own products or services to sell.

Whether that’s online training courses, 1-1 coaching, mastermind groups, ebooks, guides, retreats…let your mind run wild, because the possibilities for monetization here are limited only by your imagination.

Building out your own assets to sell to Facebook group members takes time, and it’s something you should definitely pair with a solid email marketing strategy. It’s best to do it all at once (and correctly, from the start), so make sure you map out the rollout in advance.

Still, it’s worth investing in your brand by building out your own products/services for sale. Make no mistake about it – if you’re monetizing your Facebook group properly, you’re turning it into a brand itself.

Also worth noting: trademarks. If your group is big enough to monetize, it’s worth securing the trademark rights to (contact us if you need an attorney referral). Extra worth noting: don’t use any trademarked names or copyrighted material (and don’t source images from Google!). If you have in the past, take the time to delete it all ASAP.

It’s worth having your ducks in a row on this before you monetize your Facebook group. Once you get bigger and make money from Facebook groups you manage, you and your website only become bigger targets from copyright trolls.

How to Use Your Facebook Group to Get Free Stuff

Remember HARO, from above? This is why you want to get your Alexa ranking under 1 million: if you can do this, you can send HARO queries – and get all kinds of free stuff.

You’re going to need to produce a lot of blog content anyway, right? Why not source quotes from experts with large followings of their own, who will then promote your content (and link to your FB group) when the article goes live?

When you quote experts in your content (or give them a heads up that they’re being talked about in your group…say, via Twitter, where getting on an influencer’s radar is just an @ away) you bake content marketing into the content itself.

OF COURSE the influencer you praised/quoted/linked to is going to help you promote that content! Or at least, the vast majority of them will.

You can even crowdsource most of your listicle content this way – we even do it at TCF (here’s an example). This cuts down on your content production time/cost, helps generate social media shares and backlinks, plus it can help attract more people to your Facebook group.

Here’s another fun fact: it’s mostly a bunch of thirsty PR reps on the receiving end of these HAROs.

If you’ve got a Facebook group that focuses on people who collect airline miles because they travel a lot for business (and a website with an Alexa ranking of under 1 million), you can send out a query for, let’s say, the best accessories for business travelers.

Without a doubt, you’ll get some responses to consider in your blog post. But some of those companies might offer to send you something to review. In fact, a lot of companies might make this offer – your odds go up considerably when you proactively ask.

This is an easy way to get free swag to review on your blog. And as a bonus, this is swag that you also get to keep – or give away to group members in contests (this will also increase group engagement, depending on the parameters of the giveaway).

If you don’t feel comfortable asking for money in exchange for an ad, consider asking for free products (or services) instead – both to review, but also to give away on your blog and in your Facebook group. This can be a good way to build case studies for future deals that involve actual money.

Have questions about how to make money from Facebook groups?

If all this sounds complicated and like a lot of work…you’re not wrong. The good news is, we can help you monetize your Facebook group – in addition to managing digital marketing for clients, we offer consulting and training services. We even have a Facebook group on Facebook group monetization (join us!), where we also facilitate mastermind sessions for admins of large groups.

Contact us to learn more about our consulting services – we can even help you put together that press kit that’s so important!