How do you use Facebook Groups to help grow your business? Inside my Inner Circle mastermind, the members voted twice that Christina Rowe had the secrets. So I finally sat down with her to get all of the details about how she leverages Facebook Groups and the possibilities are suddenly endless!

Whether you’re looking to leverage a small or large group, the ideas and strategies in this episode will get your mind reeling and the wheels churning!

Join The ClickFunnels Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/ClickFunnels/

And model Christina Rowe’s group:
https://WomenHelpingWomen.group


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People always want to talk about themselves. If you have a group and you start asking them questions about in three words, what do you do? People love to answer that, or even where do you live? People, anytime you're getting them, each time they're voting for your group because they're commenting or engaging, it's going to be more engagement. Facebook gets the signals out, this is a good group. This is something people want to see. It'll recommend it more.

Christina Rowe:
You don't need a giant group to make money with Facebook groups. That's a big myth. People think you need this big giant group. I mean, I know people, members of mine who've had very small groups that made millions of dollars.
There's maybe 3,000 people or a couple hundred people, they'll do very well. It is just the right people. That's, that's the most important thing, getting them into your group. You're right, target market.

Russell Brunson:
In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars in my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I'm excited to say we've got a really special episode for any of you guys who want to figure out how do we build a list, how do we get more traffic? How do we get a following of people who we can sell to in the future without spending a ton of money? I don't know about most of you guys, but right now the climate in Payd Ads is getting harder and harder. It costs more money to get traffic. We used to spend, back when we launched ClickFunnels, we were spending two or $3 to get somebody to opt into a webinar.

Now today, it's like five to $10 per opt-in for register, to register for webinar. It's crazy how expensive it's gotten, and if you're not really good at funnels, it's getting harder and harder to be successful online. I've seen that just inside the ClickFunnels community. People who 10 years ago had a lot of success because ads were so cheap. They had these funnels, they blew up. Now today, because it's harder, a lot of these people aren't able to stay in business right now. I've been trying to find who are the people who are having a lot of success getting traffic. That's not the typical way to get traffic. It's not just buying ads on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, but they're doing things that are different, that are unique. I'm excited because the special guest we have for you today is someone who's built a Facebook group of over 850,000 people.

Those people who joined the Facebook group also joined her email list. She's got an email list of the same size and she's using this in business after business, market after market to grow an audience before someone launches a product. It's really fascinating. It's using Facebook groups. It's funny, I don't know about you, but I've had a Facebook group for a long time. In fact, ClickFunnels, when we first launched ClickFunnels, we couldn't keep up with the support demands we had. We created a Facebook groups like ClickFunnels, I think it was community support. We'd have everyone submit a ticket and then go to the community, maybe they could help you try to help us out. This little community support went from five people to 500 people to 5,000 to 50,000 to five, not 500,000. I think it's 300 and something thousand people now in this group.

For me, it's been this thing where I didn't know what to do with it. It's an asset, but I don't know how to monetize it. It's this thing and it's like, and so I've been trying to figure how do we have success with our Facebook groups? I didn't know. What's interesting is in my inner circle, the last two inner circle meetings, everyone here basically to be in the inner circle, you have made at least a million dollars. You have won a Two Comma Club award to be able to apply to be in the groups. Everyone here is successful. They’ve all won a Two Comma Club award, they're all, they're doing good things and everyone has a chance to master my network. Then based on what's happening over the event, the people have the best presentations come on stage and share what they did, how they did it.

The person I'm going to introduce you guys today during today's podcast interview actually went in the last two times in a row, won the contest where she was on stage explaining her Facebook group strategy because it's so cool and it's unique and it's different and it's a way to get a lot of traffic for free. Again, she's got 850,000 people in Facebook group on an email list and she didn't pay Zuckerberg anything for that, which is crazy.

This is also something if you're just getting started, that's powerful. If you're working on a funnel, working on a product or something and you're like, Who am I going to sell this to when it's done," right? If you follow the process, you're going to learn today's episode. You can start a Facebook group getting people in there so that by the time your product's ready, you already have an audience who's ready and willing to listen to what you have to say. This is something, if you're beginner, it's going to be powerful. If you're advanced marketer, it's going to be amazing as well. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today, Ms. Christina Rowe, and it's going to be a lot of fun. Let's jump right into how to grow your company with Facebook groups.

What's up everybody? I'm excited today to be talking to you guys about traffic and lead generation through a different unique method that our guest has mastered. I'm excited to interview her to find out exactly how she's doing it. Her name is Christina Rowe. She's been in my inner circle for a while now. The last two inner circle meetings, everyone breaks down. We have 100 really high-level entrepreneurs in these rooms. Everyone has a chance to go and mastermind individually, and then each of the rooms people vote on who had the best idea or the best way to grow their companies and things like that. Two times in a row you've won. Come on stage and share it with everybody. I've been in the back and I kind of hear you talking about it. I'm trying to take notes. It's hard to understand. I pulled you aside today to find out all the stuff for me and for everyone who's listening about how you have done that, which is going to be exciting, so I'm excited.

Christina:
Oh, thank you, Russell, for having me. I'm excited. I just love to talk about Facebook groups because I believe they're the greatest lead generator that you can have for free organically.

Russell:
It's interesting. Most Facebook is, at least for us, it costs so much money. Also, on top of it, we've built a group. We have 300,000 people in our group and we're not making any money off of at all. I'm like, there's something I'm doing wrong for sure, and something you're doing right. For sure. I guess my first question is how did you ... Actually, just go back a little more, so people who don't know who you are, tell us about your business, how you got started into the whole world of online marketing.

Christina:
Sure, so in my former life, I call it, I used to own a hair and nail salon way back in New Jersey. When I got divorced and sold that, I decided to write a book about divorce and it was called Seven Secrets to Successful Divorce, and it was for women. I had a choice, it was 2006, whether to try to get a publisher and then this thing called online marketing. I went down that route and loved it. Then other people started saying, "Oh, can you help me with your business? Help me, coach me, teach me how to do it." I've been old school back when we had Front Page, we didn't have ClickFunnels, right? You guys do not realize how it was back then.

Russell:
Because I used Front Page all the way until ClickFunnels was launch. That was the same way. I love it.

Christina:
I loved Front Page. That was my first funnel builder. Then I started a women's organization in South Florida when I moved there. That's how I got involved eventually creating the Facebook group. The original group, it was mainly 1,000 women from South Florida, it's called the Women Helping Women Entrepreneurs. Then it started to just grow more women, started to join lots of conversations, and I noticed-

Russell:
It was all organically or did you do anything to make it grow at that point?

Christina:
Oh, that was just all started all organically. Word of mouth, a lot of members inviting other women. I think the key was it was the engagement because I think two things, it's the engagement and the name of the group. The group being Women Helping Women Entrepreneurs. When people searching Facebook looking like women are looking for help, they're going to put women, entrepreneurs and Facebook's little bots go out and will show your group based on your keywords. That's why you'll see in groups you ever notice, you'll see, it'll say, "Would you' like to join this group?" It's just all recommending other groups that you may like. I think that's what helped kickstart it in the beginning. Then it started taking off and I realized at the time I was doing coaching, personal coaching, and so were everyone else in my group. I was like, "Okay, I can't compete with my own members." I took a step back and decided to create a new model for the group. I did a continuity membership program where I allow the women to promote their businesses in the group.

Russell:
To the other women internally.

Christina:
Yes, and that's what really started making it explode because the women were using it to grow their own businesses and to this day that's what they do. Now we're up to 850,000 women.

All over the world, it's amazing. So many different countries and it's just been incredible. A lot of those women have invited. That's a great way to get members to your group is to ask your members if you love the group, share it. I've never done a contest, but I've known group members who've done contests invite this many people and get them in. You don't need a giant group to make money with Facebook groups. That's a big myth. People think you need this big giant group. I mean, I know people, members of mine who've had very small groups that made millions of dollars. There's maybe 3,000 people or a couple hundred people, they'll do very well. It is just the right people that that's the most important thing.

Getting them into your group, you're right, target market.

Russell:
Interesting, so outside creating it and started growing organically and stuff like that, was there ever a spot where you're buying ads or pushing? I know some people do do that, right? We haven't done that, but I think there's ways to buy ads but also grow the group as well, right?

Christina:
Yes. There is now, I have never done that for my group personally, but there's a brand new feature that came out about six months ago. It's called Promote Your Group. You'll see it under your manage section. You'll look and it'll say Promote Group, and basically it's like boosting your Facebook group. It'll populate with about section of your group and then it'll allow you to pick your audience. The key with that, I have a lot of smaller groups as well. We have different countries, different states. We're all over with groups. I've lost count of how many groups I have. I don't even know how many more, but I've tested it out in my smaller and I've gotten some really high quality members.

For example, right now I'm doing, because we're having an event in London in May, so I have a UK group. I just went into there, did promote group, and I changed the about section a little bit up, just made it shorter. Then it mentioned that we're having getting together, made it more join this community. Then I targeted women at a certain age who are in the London area. Then I picked coaches. Coaches, that demographic, and I'd be getting tons. It was couple of days, tons of new members. I put $100 into it. I did this with my Arizona group and I think I spent a hundred dollars and I got 51 women entrepreneurs who make over 100,000 into the group with email addresses. It could be very powerful.

Russell:
What's that? That's a $2 a lead, or 8, my math right on that?

Christina:
I think. Yep, about $2 a lead.

Russell:
That's crazy.

Christina:
Yeah. Yeah. I think because it's a newer feature, Facebook isn't charging as much for it. I did try it on being more vague in a different group and it didn't work as well. I think you have to really be very specific in location-wise. Don't try to do the ad for the whole United States at once. Target it and test it and be very specific. Then Facebook will go out and show it to people. Then I think a better thing to do, and I haven't done this yet, is to put something really irresistible lead magnet in the ad because they're going to see join group on the bottom. If you give some the ethical bribe and then they can only access it by getting in the group, they'll be more apt to join the group as well.

Russell:
Interesting. Okay. I want to understand your model then. You've got your huge group and then you have the little group. Is this all feeding the same business or are they all different businesses? What's the model look like?

Christina:
Oh, same business. It's the standout online membership program. Always, I started out, it was for years, it was 97 a month, now it's 197. That gives them the ability to, they get to promote in the business, they get promotional post, they go live, they get other features like spotlights and directory and all that stuff. That's the main, everything feeds into that. Plus, the courses and all that other stuff, but all the local groups feed into the big groups.

Russell:
Do you do local groups to find the people locally, then you push them from there into the bigger group?

Christina:
Yeah, they've all pushed in. They all go into the order responders, every new member comes in, get the emails. Not everybody's going to give you an email, but we still, people ask me, "So you still accept them?" Well, we do, and so they all go into the welcome series of emails and then in the part of that will be to convert them into becoming a paid member. That's been the model of just driving them all back to the main group to promote.

Russell:
I was actually, before we had started the interview, I actually found your sales learners reading it to see how you were doing it and saw that was like $197 a month. They promote inside the group, so basically they're doing Facebook lives and their stuff.

Christina:
Yes.

Russell:
I'm curious, does it make the group crazy when you have, I don't know how many members you have, but they're all posting stuff all the time, or does that just increase engagement? What's it feel like? I'm not a female entrepreneur. I haven't snuck in yet. I don't know how to get in the group, but I want to know what's happening.

Christina:
Yeah, because we have only women, but so we do schedule out the lives, so we try to not have maybe a 15-minute overlap post, though they can post whenever they want. They're all on pre-approval. Anybody who becomes a paid member gets pre-approval. What really works are call to action like two-step posts, that's what really does phenomenal in groups. It's giving something of high value away for free. This is what the women do. They're like, "I've created this training, I've got X result with it, so I made $780,000 doing this and here's my free training. Who wants it before I make it paid?" Me, me, me. Then in the comments everybody's saying yes.

Then they'll go in and respond to those and either lead them to their own Facebook group or to the beginning of their funnel. I like to say leading them to your Facebook group is very powerful way to grow your Facebook group because if you're giving them that training, once they get the three questions, they have to give you the email, 'cause you'll say, "Well, we need your email. We can't send you the training, we need your email," so now you've got them both. You've got them, you're going to put them into your order responder and you're also getting them into your group. Chances are then if they're acting interactive, they'll see in the feed, the Facebook feed, they'll see your group. It's like a double whammy.

Russell:
I'm assuming that all these women who are posting too just helps the group, the quality of the group, getting more people, it shows on people's feeds more often. It increases the value and all that kind of stuff from them as well, right?

Christina:
Yeah. It's because engagement, you know how the algorithm works for groups or for posts or anything is the more you like or comment. Facebook says, "Okay, you like that? We're going to show you more of that," so that's what happens inside of groups is that they see, "Okay, you like that group. You've just asked five, 10 people. You just said, 'Yes, I want that,'" or are you having a conversation? I mean, we have a lot of posts too that are very, people want help. "I'm ready to quit. I'm so frustrated with my business, what do I do?" Then everybody rallies. Those are really nice, the value type posts. But these posts that are on the color backgrounds that are the short call to action posts, you tend to see those first in the group because they're the ones getting massive amounts, like 1,000, 2,000 comments, huge reach because people are excited to get those lead magnets.

Russell:
Yeah, so cool. Am I allowed to ask how many members you have paying for that, or is that top secret? Curious.

Christina:
Sure, yeah. Yeah, so I think we have close to 1,000, I believe.

Russell:
Okay.

Christina:
Yeah.

Russell:
That's so cool.

Christina:
About 1,000.

Russell:
Then do you have, I'm just imagining on my side thinking how could I implement this and what I'm doing? Do you have people who sign up for it and they start, in my world, there's a lot of people, I don't want them to talk to my audience. They're going to spam them, they're going to do stuff like that, going to, you know what I mean? Do you have any of those kind of issues or do you have to deal with and kick people out or whatever, or is it not too bad?

Christina:
Well, no, we get issues with, well, women fighting. Oh yeah, yeah, yes. Oh yeah. We have a lot of moderates by 17 moderators in the group, and we have very strict rules and they'll spam each other's comp. Somebody who's paying will have a post and they'll come in and try to pervade in the comments and immediately they're warned and then kicked out. Though, more of an issue used to be is we have to have very strict rules. There's no politics. You cannot talk about, I mean, they'll fight over anything. They fought over The Barbie Movie. Okay, yes. We had fights. Like, oh yeah, they'll just, I mean, crazy things. You'll be like, "What? Why are these women fighting?" Because women can get, when they're in conversations. We have to be on top of it at all times. Yeah.

Russell:
I imagine when they're going live and stuff. You said you schedule out when they're able to go live. If you have 1,000 people, is 1,000 lives a month happening?

Christina:
Well, not everybody takes a ... It's like people join and some of them don't want to go live ever. They don't want to be live. Some of them will ask, "Can I just do two posts?" We will allow that, or they'll just, they won't go live at all. We haven't had that problem where it's just too many people, so many people in the group, such a large group that it hasn't been an issue for us as far as lives being overlapping each other, thankfully.

Russell:
Yeah, interesting. Your students, other people you know who you've trained on this, are they doing the same model where their members go live, or is it just focusing on building groups for other purposes or both?

Christina:
Well, it was interesting. When I started this, and we started the group in October 2016 and the membership model, I think it was the beginning of 2018. Since then, there's been several of my members who have grown their groups to maybe 100,000, 50,000, 70,000 who have now taken my model and they're doing my model. They're feeding from my group, paid members to their group, and we've got members who are paying for all of our groups. It's like a little network. I've actually did Zooms with several of these women. I'm like, "We've got to collaborate somehow on this." They'll figure out the idea how we can do something together, but it's interesting. It's like a network of women who've decided that this is a great model, but many members come into my group and they'll quickly build their group up to huge levels by just simple asking questions like a question, just like we have a member who just asks, "Who here wants to meet on Zoom on Thursdays and have coffee and collaborate? Let me know." Then all these people, "Oh my God, yes, yes." Then she's inviting them to her Facebook group ...

Russell:
Interesting.

Christina:
... And getting them in.

Russell:
Yeah, so I'm thinking about it now. We have a business we're launching, it's called Understand Me. You may know about, it's a personality thing, but I'm trying to figure out, because I feel like that would be a really cool place to have a group because everyone in there sharing their, "Here's my personality, here's my disk, here's my 16." It can be fun engagement anyway, but if I was to hire you to consult me, what would you look like? What would you try to do with something like that, with a group like that?

Christina:
Well, I'd first want to identify who the exact target market of people that you want into the group. Then I would do some searches. First thing I always do when I tell anybody to do this is like, "Okay, think exactly who is the person looking for a group like that? What will they be thinking when they're searching in the search bar to join a community?" Because everybody joins communities 'cause they want to be with like-minded people or they want answers to questions. You have to put yourself in their shoes and then see when you put those that search and hit groups, what's coming up? What groups are coming up? Then you could quickly see the ones with a lot of members and the ones that maybe are flopping and you just look and see and you'll get an idea of what to name it, 'cause that's really important. The name, the name is number one.

Then you're about section. You wanted to load it up with all the keywords related to the person that you're trying to target and to niche to. That would be the step number one to create the group that way. Then once you have that, then you would, again, you'd want to start drawing in people into the group, even for your personal profile. Doing the two-step post that I just spoke about, you do it on your personal profile and where are they're going to get, whatever you're giving away on that concept will be inside that group, so it'll drive people from your personal profile.

Russell:
You have the initial surge of people in there.

Christina:
Yes.

Russell:
That's my fear is you start an ad, the first person signs them, they're the first member. It's like a ...

Christina:
Right, right.

Russell:
... Ghost town. Am I in the wrong spot here?

Christina:
Yeah. You want to actually plant some people in there first you to get the conversation going. People always want to talk about themselves. If you have a group and you start asking them questions about in three words, what do you do? People love to answer that, or even where do you live? People, anytime you're getting them, each time they're voting for your group because they're commenting or engaging, it's going to be more engagement. Facebook gets the singles out, this is a good group. This is something people want to see. It'll recommend it more. That's where it really comes into getting your Facebook to do the work, the heavy lifting for you for free, is showing your group. We were lucky and fortunate, we were one of the Facebook commercials, if you remember the commercials. Yeah, they asked me and they did two or three versions of a commercial for us, and they even a radio spot, which I did the voiceover for, which was really exciting.

Russell:
I'm curious, did you get traction from the radio and TV to the group? Were you able to see people coming in?

Christina:
Yeah, I mean I guess they were coming. We just get them so many members all the time ...

Russell:
You have no idea where they're coming from, yeah.

Christina:
... But there was a little uptick in that time period when they were running the commercials. It was just really cool.

Russell:
I remember that happened. I remember sitting there and I was watching TV and some ad came up for Facebook group, maybe it was, but I was like, "How crazy that Facebook's advertising groups on TV?" I remember thinking, this must be something big that we're not even aware of. We're not paying attention to if they're buying ads to promote it, which is interesting.

Christina:
It's interesting because I was invited in 2019 before COVID, early to the Facebook community summit, which was in Menlo Park at Facebook. It was thrilling to actually be there. I had to make a post, "I'm posting on Facebook while I'm at Facebook." That was super cool. They do those virtually now, but they were very invested in community. I think Zuckerberg had said at one point, "The heart of Facebook is the communities," and there's I think 1.8 billion people in Facebook groups. That's where you say, "Well, Facebook is for old people," or you get all of that, but people still go for groups and maybe your family and your friends. I think they get the most engagement from groups and that's why they've been invested in it.

Russell:
Yeah. Now next question I have is I'm thinking about logistically, we have our big ClickFunnels group, which is similar to your big group. When you start talking about the fact that you have these little ones in different cities, I was like, "Oh, how cool that'd be if we had Funnel Hacker meetups or entrepreneur groups in each city, but I'm curious, how do you manage all that one group's hard off to manage? I can't imagine if we had 12 or 20 or 100. How do you do it right now with all multiple groups?

Christina:
Well, I do, we have volunteers. Your biggest thing is to get volunteers. A lot of my moderators just volunteer 'cause they love the group. In that case, for you, I mean you have people volunteering to be leaders, make them into a leadership position for who wants to be a leader for whatever town you're in. Then you facilitate that and this is what you're going to moderate the group. You're going to spend X amount of time in the group per week, and then whatever perks you want to give them. One of the things we did with, and this worked really well, was now when somebody posts, we have to approve every single post. If you're not a paying member and you try to promote in the group, we have our moderators tell you have to pay, but I let them give their affiliate link. Now when they decline posts, people are, "Oh, okay, I have to pay," and they're joining. And so they're actually making money.

Russell:
Money. Oh, you have the moderator put-

Christina:
Yes.

Russell:
Okay. That’s an income stream for them...

Christina:
Yes, and that motivates them, so they make money, they're making good money by just putting, and it's exciting for them to decline people.

Russell:
Like come scam our group as much as you want.

Christina:
Yeah, exactly. Yes. Here's my link. Yes, so that's a motivation. Anytime you can motivate people by giving them any sort of perks or benefits to work for free.

Russell:
Yeah, for sure. That's really, really cool. Interesting, and then say it's a smaller local, like you said you did an event in, you say in London?

Christina:
Yes, yes. First international.

Russell:
Would that group either long-term or is it something where you're doing right now getting people there and you're going to use that to do the thing and then you close it down or just keep running now indefinitely?

Christina:
That's been there, that group, the UK group. It's a smaller group. I think it has about 3,000 people in it, and I haven't really paid much attention to it until now since I'm doing an event in there. Now I'm engaging with the members and that's really important too. Now I'm spending time in there asking questions. One really powerful feature, I don't know if you guys use it in ClickFunnels group, is the new chat feature for groups.

Russell:
I don't think we have.

Christina:
It might be ... You should look, you probably do have the ability to add a chat. For some reason, you have a big group or not everybody's getting alerted to everything but chat's a cool feature with it. You can invite your most engaged members and you can click when you start the chat and it'll say, "Invite the most engaged members of the group." What's really cool is the events for groups, they have a brand new feature that's in there a lot of people don't know about. Then you do an event through your group, so now you have the event and you want to invite people, and there's a feature that says, "Invite people who are not in the group," which I've never seen before. You can actually invite friends and stuff who are not actually in your group to this event. How you could use that is if you want to get more group members, you put the training, again, in the group, that's for the event, the free training. Now, you invite other people that are there and they can now go in and get in. They also have a new feature in there called Message Friends and it's in bulk. If you have friends in the group, you could pick all at once and send a personalized message through Messenger so you can message a bunch of your friends, "Hey, I'm doing this event."

Russell:
Is this just you as the admin or is that each member internally can also do that?

Christina:
No, this is just the admin that's for that also. The events have their own chat feature and so does your group itself that you can get people in. That gets a lot of talking. You have to be careful though, because people love to spam the giants. Oh my god, you say no spamming. "Oh, my business." Especially in the business world. Yeah, I've shut a lot of them down.

Russell:
Especially your people going, they're used to being able to promote inside the group.

Christina:
The ones who are not members, they just want to spam because they think, oh, this is my opportunity, which it's not, let's have conversations, but they could be great when people start talking, especially in smaller groups, when you get real conversations going, getting to know each other, and then they want to come back to the main group because it's a value to them.

Russell:
Yeah, interesting. I'm just thinking about in our world, we keep talking about we want to break off and do local events all over the country and the world potentially anyway, but I was like this weird chicken and the egg, how do we do that? How do we find the right person? I'm just thinking through this, how cool would it be if we started at the Facebook group level and we have all these different groups and find out which ones have the most activity or whoever's hosting, moderating, whatever it is, then we could start doing local events and have, there's the group that's already pre-built and then from there it's like, oh, we're going to meet. We're all going to hang out or whatever.

Christina:
Oh, that is a great idea.

Russell:
Which should be kind of fun.

Christina:
I love that. That is so powerful because in two, when you use it, you want to even use to promote your group feature locally, like I did with Arizona. I just picked three little cities in Arizona close by, and it was just like, boom, getting in these highly qualified people. People love that. People want to, everybody, this feels like all Zoomed out, want to get back in person. By doing that in local communities and bringing ClickFunnels all over the country, that that would be so powerful.

Russell:
Be really cool.

Christina:
Oh yeah. People would absolutely go crazy for that. Then they can meet each other and network.

Russell:
Yeah, and I don't know, do you know who Pace Morby is?

Christina:
Yes, yes. He's amazing.

Russell:
Pace is amazing. One of the coolest things he does is he has meetups happening. I don't know how he did it initially, but every weekend there's a meetup, like 50 or 60 of them around the country. Then he randomly will fly to each to different ones and people will have no idea if he's going to come. Then if they do, he'll find the head coordinators, "I'm going to be in Tampa tonight, tell everybody." Then he'll show up and there'll be 800 or 1,000 people all show up and spend all day. They're hanging out. I was like, I want to figure out how to replicate that, but again, it was like how do we start building those groups initially? I think that doing it through Facebook initially and seeing where the pockets of excitement are at and stuff like that could be the way to do it.

Christina:
You could see it starting in the major cities and you'll see one which or which states, we do ours by states and just seeing which states are most active. We have ones with six, 7,000, 5,000 depending on the state or area.

Russell:
Do you have one in each state right now for yours?

Christina:
Not every single state, but the major ones. We have Florida, Texas, California. We do have the small, I mean, we have so many of them.

Russell:
I don't make it. Do we make the cut? No.

Christina:
Man, you're a man. I know we got to make a man version, but that would be phenomenal for you though. I could see that people would really love to join their local group in say Arizona, the ClickFunnels Arizona group, and then have, knowing that you might show up would be really cool.

Russell:
Be really cool.

Christina:
Oh yeah, they'd be so excited.

Russell:
Interesting. Man, there's many ideas that runs through my head right now as we're talking. It's hard to ask you questions. I'm thinking about how I can apply it. Let me think some more. What are the things am I maybe forgetting or not thinking about? If I was going to go deeper, if someone who's listening to this, I want to go deep on this, I want to start creating my own group. Group or groups. What are the other things that they're probably not thinking about?

Christina:
Well, the power of other people's groups. Going into other people's groups and building your own group with that. There's some, I won't mention names of anything, but there's some really cool software and I'm actually going to be white labeling one that actually does something really crazy. You can literally go to a group and get all the members out their IDs and then run ads.

Russell:
Oh really?

Christina:
Yeah, that's super cool. You could go to a group, I'll give you an example. My daughter has a product for Golden Retriever. It's called the Healthy Golden Supplement. She needs Golden Retriever owners, but that's a hard niche even with ads because it's like people like Golden Retrievers, but it doesn't mean they have one in their house. There are Facebook groups for Golden Retriever owners. She can go in there, go to the members list, and then it will import into a pipeline, all of the members. Then you can export that, run it to Facebook, to the Facebook ads, then use the Promote Group feature, go in and invite all those people to your group.

Russell:
Oh, that's cool.

Christina:
Now you're getting in your group and they're exactly, I was all geeked out and excited. I was like, "Oh my God, I can do this. Oh my God." I'm like, "This is so awesome. This should be illegal."

Russell:
That is really cool. Now you have these groups. Are you spending time in them? Are you posting, you do anything, or is it just kind of all member-run, user-generated content at this point,?

Christina:
It's very highly user-generated. The group I do though, I'll do webinars or I'll do lives and a lot of times I'll Restream them back, use Restream and stream to all the groups. Now, unfortunately, that's going away, and it's apps. Facebook's taking away all the apps for groups, all API I don't know if you heard about that. No more scheduling groups, no more Zoom live streams, unless they figure something out. There'll probably be a lot of go-arounds to that. It's been a great feature to be able to do that, but you could still use Live Producer. It's a little more complicated.

Russell:
That's Facebook's version, right?

Christina:
Yeah. Facebook has Live Producer, which actually has some cool benefits on that too. You can pin a post. When you go live, your first comment has the link to your product and you can promote your groups automatically while you're going live with Live Producer. They ask you, "Which group do you want to promote in your live?" There's some cool features with that as well.

Russell:
With Live Producer, can you push to multiple groups at once or just one at each time?

Christina:
I've been using it through, I think, well, you could still use something like Restream with, because you put that key in, that RTMP key. I think you could still use a software like you were talking about Live Pigeon or Restream. You probably can still use that. You just can't go through an app inside of it. You know how you add all the apps to your group? You're not going to be able to do that.

Russell:
Gotcha.

Christina:
Which, yeah.

Russell:
Very cool. Now, I know when people do join a Facebook group, you can ask the question, they get them on an email list. I'm assuming that's a big part of your strategy is building this whole process as well. Then is your goal with that, do you push people back into the group? Do you push them just the membership or what's the strategy with the list you're building on the back side?

Christina:
Well, you always want to push them always back to your group for engagement. Even if you're doing a training or anything in the group, you want to get them back in, say it's inside the group. One of the things I tell people to use a deep link thing like URL Genie Genius to cloak it so that when it's so frustrating, you get that email, "Oh, meet me in the group," and you open it and now you're not logged in. You're like, "Oh, forget it. I forgot my password." That will get you right in, so that's really great. Yeah, so another thing we've been doing lately is with pipelines is taking people from the group when they're new members and then tagging them. You can do your automatic tagging where Facebook gives you the tag, so we put that in admin assist now.

It does it automatically. Every 200 members, it just puts the post out and we do mention our membership. "Listen, this is the rules you can't promote, but if you want to promote and here's our newsletter." Then the other thing we do is have the VA go in and go and tag them in the welcome to the group video as well. They get new members are getting hit twice there, and then we can DM them as well and welcome them and then give them a lead magnet. "Oh, we got this automated webinar," or something we give them to get them in and move them through the pipeline. That's the way to get them on the backend is to use something like that.

Russell:
Yeah, that's awesome. Man, I'm literally so excited right now to go our ... Again, we don't have a group strategy right now than we've had a big group and we're trying to moderate and keep people stop spamming trying to do stuff. It's almost like it's been chaos part's. Like wish we could shut this thing down. We didn't know how to use it as an asset correctly. You know what I mean?

Christina:
It's a huge asset.

Russell:
Yeah. It could and it should be. There's more members in our Facebook group than we have members using the platform. It's like how do we get these people to become users of the platform and how do we give them buy in more into our culture and all that kind of stuff? Right now, it's just been more reactionary of just like what did we create? We didn't promote it either. It was literally when we first launched ClickFunnels, we didn't have support people to handle support. It was like ClickFunnels support group, "Do you have a question? Post it here. We can all ... Members help each other." That's how it started. Now, we're at 350,000 members, whatever.

Christina:
Oh, it's overwhelming.

Russell:
What do we do? We don't know to do at this point. There's so many people coming in spamming and it's just been ...

Christina:
Oh, spam, it's tough.

Russell:
... To keep it going is really hard.

Christina:
Oh yeah, and that's been an issue with Facebook groups in general. You'll see those telegram spammers and stuff too. How did these people get in? You wonder, like I've heard they're using bots, they're using AI to get in. They steal profiles. That's a thing we deal with on a basis too, is, and we always ask the members report the spam because sometimes they'll block the admins and all the moderators.

Russell:
Oh really?

Christina:
Then you won't know, and then the members have to tell us, we'll say, because we can't remove them until somebody reports them and then we can see it. Yeah, it's a whole thing, but it's still such a great, especially for the new members coming in to put them through a process where you have, you're moving them along and you getting them from the get-go and giving them new resources and exciting things so they can learn ClickFunnels.

Russell:
Yeah, so interesting. I was thinking about the people that are doing all the spamming and stuff. I'm like, if you just took the same effort and ingenuity and just sold legitimate things, you'd be the best marketers on the planet.

Christina:
Right. It's crazy.

Russell:
All the loopholes they have to go through to spam people, which then it's like the success rate on that kind of stuff can't be that high.

Christina:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's like Mr. James has ... Contact him. It's like crazy stuff that they put there. It's so spammy and everybody knows that's spam, but then there'll be people who comment on that. I'm like, "No. Oh my gosh, come on."

Russell:
How did you fall for that?

Christina:
Yeah, how did you fall for it? But people do unfortunately.

Russell:
Yeah, so cool. I think this is awesome because I think, again, we're in a world right now, at least for us, where it's like Zuckerberg's charging so much money for ads and we're trying to figure out other ways, other things to do. For us, we've been redoubling down all the organic things that we're trying to, focusing on an email list and stuff like that. This is just such a unique different thing. Again, I haven't met anyone in our community who's really crushing it with groups besides you, so it's been fun to see ...

Christina:
Oh, thank you.

Russell:
... To watch what you're doing and understanding it. This has been super helpful for me to figure out some ideas how we can take the asset we have and actually monetize it correctly but then secondarily, is what's the future? How could we create, we talked about the groups or things like that, or even just some of our other businesses that are coming in with our personality profiling company or with Dan Kennedy's company creating ... I've always looked at groups as such a powerful tool, but also one that's so scary that we just kind of like, ah, it's like a necessary evil that we're not, we don't-

Christina:
Right, to have somebody dedicated to it. I mean, definitely even with Secrets of Success, you've got all the mindset people. That's a whole niche in itself. That should be a community, a Facebook group for that because those are all people loving to talk about law of attraction and all. I even have a small little group for that I just had made for fun just for talking about your future self and law of attraction and manifesting. Those people are very active and there's less, they're not spammers either. Those people just want to talk about.

That's the whole thing. It's like we have to understand that people are in groups for community. As marketers, we always want to be marketing or I see the mistake coaches will make when they start a group, they'll make it all about them. It's one-sided and then people lose interest in the group. It's got to be user-generated. Members have to be interacting and being allowed to speak and to be able to connect with other people, 'cause that's the reason that they're going to groups, they don't care so much about the group itself, but then they will see your stuff and then if it's an enjoyable place, they'll buy. A little bit of a different, it's really creating a community. That's the main thing with it.

Russell:
Are there people, you can hire someone to run Facebook ads, you can hire someone to run social media, there are people, is that a thing where people could hire people to run Facebook groups for you to manage them? Do all the stuff you're talking about or something or it's different where most people are just doing on their own?

Christina:
It depends on what level on your own as far as strategy-wise would be at a higher level. As far as moderation, they have even you go on Fiverr. I mean, I had got two moderators from Fiverr who were, I took both of them off and they both work for me. Yeah, they will say, "I'm a Facebook group moderator," and they have experienced doing that. Like moderating, approving. Oh yeah. There's people out there who would definitely do that or Upwork that you could find that they've worked with other groups, they know how to do it. Those are the ones you'd want to vet and make sure they have good ratings and stuff and bring in until you don't have to worry about, I don't touch any of that anymore, thank gosh. Because when originally they didn't even have, now we have software that puts the group members right into, uploads them, puts them to wherever you want to send them the emails. When it started, I had by hand, I would sit there for hours taking each group member, putting their name, their email address in a spreadsheet.

Russell:
Really?

Christina:
Until my hand was ready to ... Oh yeah, it was terrible until then, group funnels came out and this and that, where it just shoots everything up, and there's so many different softwares that do that now, which is makes life a lot easier, especially when you're getting a lot of members. A lot of it could be automated actually, with the technology that we have now. Thankfully.

Russell:
Man, that's so cool. The moderators you're paying from Fiverr and stuff, do you still pay them or do you just give them the affiliate commission when they're promoting stuff or both?

Christina:
Oh, well the two I have, they do. Those two don't get the affiliate. They do more other things in the business too. We have two people who just do approvals. The moderators who moderate and approve or decline posts, those are the ones that do get the affiliate commission, 'cause they're in there having to review because every single post has to be reviewed. When you're getting a massive amount, it's a lot of work. Their incentive, they don't get paid, they make money getting commission.

Russell:
On the back end, are they able to see who's a paid member versus a free member when they're seeing the reviews? Is there a way to see that or they have to manually look at each person?

Christina:
Oh yes, so all of our paid members get a pre-approval and we also make them group experts. So they've got the group expert badge.

Russell:
Yeah, so they know that they're-

Christina:
Yeah, and then they know too, they're supposed to put for standout member, they put SOM in the post because other members will start reporting them for spam, but they're allowed to promote, so they put that, add that little tag, but they flub and forget to do that. Yeah, but you want to identify too, but the moderators will know that those people are on that list in the back end of Facebook, you can see who has pre-approval and who doesn't.

Russell:
Is it possible if someone, they cancel their $197 membership that automatically downgraded or whatever, or is it a manual thing? Someone's got to go-

Christina:
Oh, we got to manually go in. Oh yeah. Especially with memberships. People take credit cards or they don't pay, and then you got to go in and ...

Russell:
Constant thing.

Christina:
... Yeah, you got to go in and what we'll do is say they haven't paid and they still post, so we'll take the post down, we'll put the note for them. You got to update your billing. It's a whole other a beast. Yeah, somebody doing that too.

Russell:
There's a whole process in the back end, yeah…

Christina:
Oh, yeah. Well, that's with continuity reoccurring membership. That's the part of the business, especially with my, we have to manually go and take away the pre-approval when they cancel, so yeah, it's not fun.

Russell:
That's so cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing this stuff. I think hopefully for anyone who's struggling on traffic, struggling, especially people who are just getting started, it's like, "I can't afford to pay $10 a lead to Facebook." It's like, "Hey, we'll make a group, start getting people in there and all of a sudden leads are coming in for free or really inexpensive." Then it gives people the ability to have an audience to actually sell to and to talk to.

Christina:
Exactly. Yeah. You just go out, get your group, start off small, bring the right people. Don't worry about making a giant target. Niche it, create it for the group and then go into other groups where you can, there's a lot of ones that do allow paid memberships. There's ones that don't, that you can ask the moderate, "Hey, I'll pay you." You can even buy Facebook groups. I don't know if that's legal for Facebook, but people do it. They buy Instagram accounts and stuff too. You get access to it through a business or something. I know people who have done that and actually got built in audiences that way. Going to other groups that you can with your target market and inviting them to your group is just a really powerful way to grow your group and through your personal profile as well.

Russell:
Yeah, such a cool thing. Again, I think it's one of the best, let's get started strategies right out of the gate, everyone that should be create a group, start getting people in there. Now you have an audience. That's the biggest problem. People come to me is like, "I created this, I built a funnel, I created a product, and I have no one to sell to and I can't buy ads. Can't afford them yet. What should I do?" I'm like, so that's the hardest part, right? The hardest part. When as you're creating your product, create the group right now, start building it, start nurturing it. Tell stories about what you're studying, whatever it is that get them excited about your content, your concept. Then at that point, by the time your stuff's done, there'll be people who can, who will care. Right?

Christina:
Exactly, and that's the thing, like you just said, telling the stories, getting to know people in your group and not worrying that people, we have this thing, "Oh my gosh, only 100 people saw my reel," or well, if 100 people were in your living room right now, would you think that's a little bit amount? Even 50 people, you'd be like, "Wow," if you were in person, but everybody has these hang ups and they don't pay attention. They don't need to rock back. I think if you've a very tiny group, you can still do very well with that and grow it. You just have to nurture and spend your time and give tons of value to the people that are there who are showing up and make it about them more than you in the beginning so that they become interested and want to come back and give them tons of value.

Russell:
Yeah, that's really cool. You got me excited. Okay. Every business, we're going back engineering our group strategy. It is going to become big central focus.

Christina:
Oh yeah, I could see it. Especially the local groups. Once you run the promote to group ad, getting people in there locally, I mean, it's so easy to do to people who like the certain interests that you know already. You just run those ads right to the group because it's like, it just says join group on the ad. They're not going to a funnel. They don't have to give their email address. All they do is press the button and they're in the group. I think it's an easy, lower barrier.

Russell:
We also run the group like that because our big question too is do we find someone in Arizona and in Florida to do it? It's almost like you create the group and then I'm assuming those people rise to the top. They're the ones who are commenting, who are moderating, who are always there. It's like you find out who the leaders are by them being a leader versus, I have a friend who does something similar, but he sold access. People were buying their cities, but then the person who bought the city wasn't actually the person who was good at running it or anything. They sought the opportunity.. the whole thing crumbled because you had the wrong people. Whereas this way around, I feel like you could do that and all of a sudden you start seeing who the rock stars are and then you can approach them like, "Hey, do you want to run local meetups now?" Whatever that version is.

Christina:
Yeah. You'll see who the people rise. Yeah, you always see that in groups who's commenting all the time, who's posting, who's the natural leaders will, and then you could approach them and say, "Listen, would you like to be the leader?" They'd probably be thrilled or necessarily, yeah, you could find the locally, which is great. Then they live there and then they can do the meetups and find the locations and be the ambassador for that city and town. It's great benefit for them because it puts them in a position of authority. Give them a badge to put that they're the official ambassador or leader.

Russell:
You give each of those ambassadors the right to use their affiliate links for ClickFunnels or whatever to all the members you sign up for everybody now and, whatever…

Christina:
Yeah, all those.

Russell:
... That could be cool.

Christina:
Right, at their events. That could be the goal. See, that would be the key. Literally the event they're having, they sign everybody up that night and now they're getting all the affiliate commission on it. That's even more motivating.

Russell:
So cool. All right, I got to go home now and just work on this. This is number one thing. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this stuff. If anyone wants to see your group in action, how can they go find it? What's the best

Christina:
Sure, so the group you just go to WomenHelpingWomen.Group and that's where you'll find Women Helping Women Entrepreneurs. That's another tip. Get a URL for your group.

Russell:
I know there's a group extension now, that's exciting.

Christina:
There's a group extension, so everyone should have one for your group because this way you can shout it out without Facebook/nobody remembers.

Russell:
Oh, that's awesome. If you're a man, you can't get in the group. I'm assuming you just boot us out.

Christina:
No, man. Yeah, we all, that's another thing.

Russell:
My wife's coming in there, the longer-

Christina:
Your wife. Yes, but that you could have any woman come in to represent you. Yes. That's allowed.

Russell:
That's awesome. Man, well, thank you so much for coming and sharing this stuff and yeah, I'm excited for you. I'm proud of you.

Christina:
Oh, thank you, Russell.

Russell:
This the coolest thing in the world to see and yeah, hopefully if anyone wants to learn how to do this, follow her, watch what she's doing. Do you teach this to other entrepreneurs as well? Do you have programs teaching this stuff?

Christina:
Oh yeah, definitely. I have different courses that I, and programs that I teach of how to grow seven figure communities and Facebook groups. Yeah, I definitely teach us all in detail. I geek out on all this stuff. It's like, "Oh my gosh, you can do this, you can do that."

Russell:
All the tools are coming out and how to use them and all that kind of stuff.

Christina:
Oh yeah, that's the fun part. Trying to hunt them down and think of what you can do because Facebook's always changing, social media, so you got to keep on top of it.

Russell:
Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks so much for being here. Appreciate you and thanks for sharing this and everyone looking way to get traffic to your funnels. Building an audience ahead of time for free, group's the way to go. Christina is one who I know who's doing the best, so thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it.

Christina:
Thank you, Russell. This is wonderful. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Russell:
Thanks.

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