Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper launch a six-part series on how you can make your first $200 flipping.
How To Make Your First $200 Flipping Part 1
How To Make Your First $200 Flipping Part 2
How To Make Your First $200 Flipping Part 3
Check out our FREE Workshop: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-university-workshop-webinar
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How to boost your listings on Facebook
Reseller Hangout Podcast – How To Make Your First $200 Flipping Part 4
Rob: Okay. Are you ready for part four of our six episode series?
Melissa: On how to make your first $200 from flipping items.
Rob: Okay. Before we jump into our fourth part of this six episode series,
Melissa: We're going to recap what we have talked about already, and hopefully you've already done all the homework from the last three episodes.
So the first thing was
Rob: That's right. You should have your three to five items. You should have pulled them out of the house, the garage, wherever it's at, you should have pull those out.
Melissa: And then get them cleaned up and then take good pictures and then get them listed on Facebook Marketplace or OfferUp.
So hopefully you have three to five items listed right now on Facebook and OfferUp. Crossposting is the best if you can do both.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: And today we're going to talk about what do you do if those listings, if they're not selling.
Rob: That's right. So we're going to talk about promoted listings and another thing that you guys can do that doesn't require you actually to pay for the listing.
So, let's dive in.
Melissa: So like every platform right now, Facebook wants you to pay to play. Like every, every platform and OfferUp too, there are options for promoted listings on both platforms. We typically don't do OfferUp, but I have messed around a little bit with Facebook and I don't ever pay them a lot of money.
I do, I do use them sometimes. It's been beneficial.
Rob: But before you promote, guys, you want to go in and see how many people are actually seeing your item. So you can go in, you can look at the item and see how many views are on that item to get an idea, if you are priced right, to get an idea, if you have any activity or if people are actually reaching out to you.
Melissa: Yeah, because before all of the algorithm stuff and they wanted you to pay to play, you could get, like, I'd list a stroller, I'd get 300 to 500 views on that stroller pretty quickly in a day or two. And now you go, I go and list the same thing and I get like three views or four views. So that shows me, it's not that people aren't interested in what I have it's just not showing it to anybody.
So definitely checking those views, like you said. There's a way to go in and see how many people have seen your items.
Rob: And this might fluctuate from a metropolis or a big area that you might live in, and if it's in a small town, they might not have the opportunity to show a lot of other stuff over top of yours, so you might not have to pay anything and your local town will get the views. They will show it to everybody just to get it moving. So this is where it's important to go in and see how many people are seeing it. And take note of, if people are reaching out to you asking you questions about it, but before you actually pay to promote it.
Melissa: And I typically don't promote something till it's been sitting for about three days.
Cause usually Facebook will give it a good push in the beginning. And then if it doesn't sell after three days, then it's kind of fallen behind. So they might not get, unless somebody is searching for the item, they might not find it. So then I'll promote it after about three days of it not selling.
And I just give them a value, like a dollar a day, nothing. I don't pay them a lot because you're paying up front for that ad cost. And you don't know if it's going to sell, so you don't want to end up paying what you would have sold it for.
Rob: And the other thing is this, you can't promote something for a dollar a day that you're only asking $5 for it.
So make sure that if you're promoting it for a dollar a day, you're asking $25, over $25 for it. Something that can move, typically $25 to $100, or even over top of that, you can mess around with it a little bit and put a little bit of your budget towards that promotion for sure.
Melissa: Yeah. But if it's like a five or $10 item, then it's probably not, I mean, it won't be worth it to promote that item. And so, like I said, we've never really done it on OfferUp, but we do have a video and we'll link it below in the show notes of a visual video of how to do promoted listings. So, it's kind of hard to just describe, but you can watch it and see where that is.
So if you want it to do that and try it on your items, it could help.
Rob: So what if you don't want to pay a little bit of extra money to promote an item? What is my option in that case?
Melissa: Your option for?
Rob: Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp.
Melissa: Offering shipping.
Rob: Absolutely. You could offer shipping, but you can also delete the post and repost it and see if you can get it at the top of the feed.
How these, both of these formats work is you're going to get your item posted and it's going to start going lower and lower on the feed to get it boosted back to the top where people will see it. On normal if they're not charging you for promotions and they are pushing your item, if you delete it and throw it back in, it will come back up higher on the searches that people are just scrolling through.
Like that's how I search for items on OfferUp. I go in and look at the most recent item posted. And then I scroll from that all the way down until you get into a week, two weeks, three weeks, and I just keep scrolling up. So if you want it to go back to the top of the feed, that's what you have to do.
You have to delete the listing. Some of them, I think, even OfferUp got to the point where they would let you do it like three times where you could actually click on the item and pull it to the top of the feed.
Melissa: They don't do that anymore.
Rob: They might, but you have to check to see if you can pull it to the top of the feed, but you don't have to delete it. If you are able to do that, do that until you're not able to do it.
Melissa: Because I tried to do that just recently.
Rob: Okay. Well then you've tried it so you can't do it. So if you want to pay you can.
Melissa: On Facebook you can.
Rob: Okay. If you want to pay, you can, but if you do not want to pay, then definitely delete it and then repost it and you can get it back to the top of the feed and see if that will work for you.
Melissa: Yeah. On Facebook, they give you like three or four times that you can just renew it is what they call it, renew it. But if you try to do it on OfferUp, then it asks you to boost the post and make you pay. So, so I've never actually, I've never done it. And I'll just delete it and relist it, then that's fine.
Rob: So awesome. So like we said at the beginning, this is you're going to get your quickest results.
Now we sell 90%, 95% of our items on eBay. We're telling you to do these because eBay has a little bit more red tape, and it also is not quite as user-friendly as OfferUp.
Melissa: It's a little bit more barrier to entry. So we want to get you the money quick. So that's the whole point. And we did mention shipping really briefly.
I think we mentioned even in this series too, that we don't ship through Facebook Marketplace or OfferUp just because we typically ship higher dollar items and if something happens, you can't get any customer service on the phone. So we don't feel comfortable shipping. If it's like a $20 or $30 item, I would probably, I would be willing to ship it.
And then that will allow you to, it opens up to a lot more people. So, so that is an option. If your price point's a little bit lower. But yeah, but we don't do it just because of our items that we sell.
Rob: And they're higher, higher profit, higher dollar items.
Melissa: And we don't have a lot of things happen, but they do happen.
And so if we need to talk to eBay customer service, we can always get ahold of them. So at Facebook, good luck. It is not easy to get ahold of them.
Rob: So let us know how you guys are doing with this whole series. Are you guys getting some results? Now you have these items listed, they should be working for you.
Melissa: You should be making some sales.
Rob: That's it!
Melissa: So reach out to us, let us know DM us on Instagram. That's probably the best way to get ahold of us or comment below if you're listening to this on the blog post. But yeah, let us know. We want to know and hear some of your flips.
Rob: That's right guys. We cannot wait to hear from you. So see ya!