03: Everything You Need to Build Your Email List Faster With Facebook Ads

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03: Everything You Need to Build Your Email List Faster With Facebook Ads

10 December 2019 | By Salome Schillack

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

In Episode 3 of The Shine Show we're going to go through a complete checklist you need before you even start setting up your Facebook and Instagram ads.

To help us do this we’ll look at The List Builder’s Complete Checklist for Setting up Facebook and Instagram Ads Faster, a checklist I created to help list builders get started with their Facebook and Instagram ads

Having this checklist is kinda like having a list of ingredients before you start baking a cake or having a list of all the pieces that are included in your Lego project before you start building.

Getting started with Facebook and Instagram ads is much easier, faster, and more time-efficient if you know exactly what all the parts are that you need to get ready before you go into the Ads Manager and get started.

If you're a seasoned entrepreneur and you have an agency who run your ads, today's episode is for you too, because you're going to learn how you can better support that agency or ads manager to give them everything they need to help you succeed.

This is episode number three of The Shine Show. And in today's show we're going to look at the list builders complete checklist for setting up Facebook and Instagram ads faster, which is a checklist I created to help list builders get started with their Facebook and Instagram ads by knowing what all the parts or the pieces or the components are that goes into building a successful campaign.

It's kind of like having a list of ingredients before you start baking a cake or having a list of all the pieces that are included in your Lego project before you start building your Lego thing. It's much easier, faster, and more time efficient if you know exactly what all the parts are that you need to get ready before you go into the ads manager and get started.

And if you're a seasoned entrepreneur and you have an agency who runs your ads, today's episode is for you too, because you're going to learn how you can better support that agency or ads manager to give them the parts they need to help you succeed. So if that sounds like something you want to do, then stay tuned.

You took a huge leap forward in your journey to create a successful online business when you decided to get serious with your list building efforts and now it's time to put those efforts on autopilot and get started with Facebook and Instagram ads to help you build your email list faster so that when it comes time for you to launch your online course, you have a bigger warm crowd who are ready to buy from you because you've been priming them and you've been sending them weekly content and there's just a bigger pool you're in front of.

More people, but getting started with Facebook and Instagram ads can be daunting. I hear so many people say all that money and I just don't know how I'm going to get a return on that money. And I want to say if you haven't yet sold your course, that is a normal feeling to have because you are pouring money into something that hasn't been proven yet so, so if that's how you feel, just know that it is normal.

But if you get started with list building from the get go, you're going to build momentum so much faster in your business. It's going to keep you motivated to keep building that course, creating that course and getting it out into the market quicker. And if you are a seasoned entrepreneur who may be, have launched many, many online courses and you are not building your email is 12 months of the year [inaudible] I know who you are, then you should listen up too because this episode is for you and it's going to help you better understand what all the pieces are that goes into building a successful list building campaign so that you can support your ads manager or the agency that runs your ads for you and ensure that you know whether or not they're doing a good job in you building your email list and to help you get started with this, I created a guide for today's show called the list builders complete checklist for setting up Facebook and Instagram ads and we are going to talk through that guy to die on the episode and you can download that guide by going to the shine show.com forward slash zero zero three if you go there and you download the guide and you come back and you listen, you'll be able to go through it with me.

But if you don't have the guide in front of you right now and you just want to keep listening, maybe you're jogging on the treadmill or maybe you're driving in the car, then that's okay because you can come back and downloaded lighter and go through it again. The checklist will provide you with the necessary pieces that you need to start building your email list.

Okay, so let's get started. The very first thing that you're going to need before you start building your ads, our landing pages, you're going to need a standalone page that explains to people in very simple language what they're opting in for and most importantly, why they're opting in for it. You want to make sure that your landing page has a massive Bayner for driven headline. This is one of the mistakes I see most often is we want to describe what's in the lead magnet we're giving away, but people don't care about what's in it.

They care about what's in it for them. So make sure that you have an attention grabbing headline that's going to get them to go, Oh, I have to have that, and you can create landing pages using tools like lead pages. You can create your landing pages in WordPress. You can create landing pages in Kajabi or in click funnels. There are so many different ways, even the email service providers like MailChimp, ConvertKit and active campaign or moving more and more now towards giving you the capability of creating pages. I like using lead pages. I've just recently switched from lead pages to only using WordPress and I'm still getting used to that a little bit, but you are going to need some kind of a landing page builder, so look around, see which one works best for you and find the one that works for your budget.

Your landing page is going to link to what we call a lead box or a form. It is just the little pop up that comes up where people get to enter their email address and their name and then once they hit submit on that it goes to a thank you page and that thank you page is in Facebook ads terms. The thing that triggers for Facebook, it triggers for Facebook that there has been a conversion, so as soon as somebody hits the thank you page, then Facebook will know that there's been a conversion.

If you have the pixel set up and we're going to talk about the pixels, they will know that there has been a conversion. So first things you need, you need landing page software and that landing page software needs to link to some form of a email service provider that is going to capture those email addresses, be able to tag them and be able to send out automations.

I use active campaign in my business. Infusion soft is one that is more robust, but also the learning curve is huge to get to know how to use it. Another one that's quite robust is Ontraport, but these days the most popular ones I would say is ConvertKit. For people who are just starting out, you can even use, I think Kajabi now does that click funnels does that.

There are so many different emails, service providers. I encourage you to look around and find one that works for you. When I started my business, I started with MailChimp and I started with the free version of MailChimp and I think MailChimp is just perfect for people who are just starting out. But right now we are absolutely loving active campaign.

The second big piece of Facebook ads, once you have your pages in place is your pixels. So to explain pixels to you in the simplest terms, you should think of pixels as the, it's a little, it's, it's a little bit like fairy dust.

So just stay with me here. My kids love glitter and wherever my kids have gone in the house after they've played with the glitter, it's like a little path that they leave with glitter all over the house. And I can see they've sat on the couch cause there's glitter on the couch. I can see they've made a sandwich cause there's glitter in the kitchen and I can see they went to the swimming pool because all the way out to the swimming pool I see glitter. And sometimes I even see glitter in this swimming pool. So think of the pixels as that glitter, that fairy dust. And it is just a little piece of like fairy dust that gets sprinkled on your customer's head or on the person who waned into your lead magnet or clicked on your page, his head. And now it kind of follows them around a little bit and it gets an understanding.

It learns what they're doing and where they're doing it and what the actions are that they're taking it. And if you think this is creepy, maybe it is a little bit, but there's two sides to this coin is the one side is as consumers we love being presented with content that we love and so by having pixels track us around on the interwebs, the algorithms on Facebook and Google and everywhere else is able to give us more of the things that we're already interested in and that we really like.

The other side of it is it's creepy that something can follow you around and there are lots of things that you can do to make sure things don't follow you around too much, but that's not what this episode is about. The important thing with the pixels is you need to have your base pixel installed in your landing pages.

Facebook has extensive training on how to do that. You can Google how to do that. You can find videos on YouTube. There's so many resources for you to learn how to add your base pixel to your landing pages, and then what we like to do is to also add a lead tracking pixel to the thank you page. It's just a tiny little snippet of code that you just copy and paste into the thank you page and that's just going to help you track your conversions in a little bit more better way in a slightly more advanced way than just relying on creating custom conversions with your using your URLs.

That which leads me to custom conversions, which is the third thing you're going to need, so a custom conversion. The best way to describe what a custom conversion is is a custom conversion is the use of the pixels and the corresponding URLs of the pages that indicate the conversion, so I know that was a mouthful.

What I mean is you have a thank you page that thank you page has a URL, a unique URL and it has a Facebook pixel on it. When I want to create a custom conversion, what I'm going to do is I'm going to say to Facebook, Facebook, any time somebody lands on the page that is called shine and succeed.com forward slash list builders checklist. Thank you.

That is an indication that they have converted to a lead and because I have the pixel on there, they can be tracked. So just, I just want to repeat this again because I understand that this is quite can be quite an abstract concept. You're using the pixel that are on the pages and you're using the URL of the page that they land on. Once they've taken the action you want them to take, so they have converted to a lead, they've given you their email address.

Now they've landed on the thank you page and now you are calling them a conversion, but Facebook doesn't know that unless you tell Facebook that. So you set up a custom conversion using the URL of the thank you page and that is going to indicate to Facebook that there has been a conversion. There's a lot of training on how to set up custom conversions.

I'm not going to go into how to do this, but this is definitely one of the most important pieces you want to get right before you start setting up your ads, a setup, your custom conversion. Now, the one thing I get asked about so often is audiences. And that is the next thing we're going to look at. I want you to spend some time here and really think through who your target audience is and what the things are that they are interested in.

And in the past, I would say in the past we used to say get as specific as you can with your targeting. And that's not true today anymore to die. The algorithm is so good at finding people. For us, we actually want to try to not be very specific because if we are too specific, we narrow the audience down so much that the algorithm kind of struggles to find the right people and it struggles to give us that conversion, the repeated conversion that we're looking for.

Sometimes it's better to just keep it kind of big, keep it kind of broad but still make sure that you're matching interests to things that your audience will actually be interested in. So the first things you need to think about or things like their age, their gender and their location. And I recently saw somebody like literally take in the U S they just took the major cities and ended up narrowing down their audience so much that they couldn't find them.

And I've just said to them, why don't you just make it open as the U S the entire us? Huge. Use their age to narrow them down and then use some interests that they will be interested in and see if that helps. And it did help. It made a huge difference.

So I want you to think about wide open, big open interests. So a couple of ones that we've seen really good success with lately in the online marketing spice in the coaching space, in the business coaching space, anybody who sells personal development is targeting Oprah. That's been so successful because as soon as you put Oprah and the Oprah show and O magazine and those sorts of things in, you've got an audience of millions of people and because they're broadly interested in personal development, which is something most people who are into online marketing and into online promoting or into or if they're selling personal development courses or even the other one is Tony Robbins.

That works really well too. There's so big and so broad and actually so vague, but because they are so big and the chances of somebody being interested in that and also being interested it thing is if someone's interested in online marketing, the chance that they're interested in personal development is pretty good and they would kind of fall into either the Oprah category or the Tony Robbins category.

You know, if it's more of a female audience, they might more go into the Oprah category. If it's more of a male audience, then it might be more in the Tony Robbins category. So play around with these sorts of things. But also use your common sense. Like if you are a health coach and you work mainly with women who are interested in yoga, then you know the yoga journal might be an option. Or Lulu lemon might be an option as think about your, the values of your clients.

Think about the things that they are interested in and almost more importantly the things that they're not interested in so that you can really narrow them down. And then as far as audiences go, you definitely want to make sure that you're setting up your Facebook engagement audiences for at least 180 days. Instagram engagement audiences for at least 180 days and website visitors for at least 180 days. Those are your golden gooses. Those are your people who have shown interest in your social media. They've shown interest in your content, they're interested in your blogs, they're interested in your, in your podcasts, they're interested in everything you want to do and definitely also set up a custom audience of your current email list. That is a very important one too. So those are the audiences that you're going to want to go in and set up and think about and do this work before you open the, the, the ads manager so that you've got some good traction going with your audiences by the time you set up your ads.

The next thing you need to look at is the copy for your ads. So you are going to need a few different options for your copy. And when you sit down to write your copy, of course you're going to think about your ideal customer. You're going to keep her or him front and center of your mind and you are going to write for them in a way that is going to get their attention with the hook of the copy and then expand maybe on some pain points, maybe on some desires that they have. And just remember to keep your copy happy. Facebook likes happy copy.

You can imagine Facebook does not want us to remind people about their pine or their sadness or their overwhelm or their, whatever their negative feelings are. Because if we remind people about their negative feelings, what they do is they click away from Facebook and they go and search the web somewhere else and we do not want to lose our Facebook or Instagram viewers or the audience because we want to keep them there because then we can market to them.

So always keep your copy uplifting, focusing on the benefits they're going to get when they have taken your course or when they have downloaded your freebie or when they have read your blog post and then play around with both long copy and short copy. As some people like to read a lot. Other people don't like to read a lot. And this is kind of something that I find you learn what your audience wants and then after a while, if you've been doing long copy and short copy for a year and the only ads that convert are the short copy, then you know your audience isn't, they're not long readers, they just want it in a nutshell. So give it to them that way. But if you've been running ads for a year and all they want is to read your beautiful long paragraphs that you're writing because you're such an amazing writer and I just can't get enough of your writing, then that is the way to go.

But understand that you are going to need to taste both so that you get an understanding of what your clients need. So one tip that I wanted to give you that we learned the hard way is if you are writing a long copy, remember that on Instagram you're limited to 2,200 characters in your text. So you could end up writing this beautiful, beautiful long copy and have it more than 2,200 characters and then be completely stumped because you cannot put it on Instagram and it won't place there and they knew can't taste Instagram.

And specifically, if you are someone who's Instagram heavy, whose audiences Instagram heavy, that can be a problem for you. I have an example here of short copy. I've just been scrolling through my newsfeed to look at a short copy and long copy. So I can give you an example. An ad came up for Pinterest, which is interesting to me.

It's always, I find it fascinating when other social media platforms advertise their advertising on Facebook. Isn't that funny? Linkedin's done it. And now Pinterest is doing it too though. Pinterest ad says 300 million people use Pinterest to find what to try next. And the headline says, share your ads with the world. Little bit tongue in the cheek. I would say a 300 million people use Pinterest to find what to use next.

Share your ads with the world. In other words, they're shy saying, if you advertise on Pinterest, you are sharing your ads with more people. I love it. It's great. It's creative. It's too bad that Pinterest ads don't work very well for conversions. It works for traffic, but it doesn't work for conversions. And then I looked for some long copy and this ad came up in my news feed. It is by somebody called Allie Bjerk.

I don't know who she is. As she looked lovely and her ad was fantastic and I thought I would share this with you. And I'm going to read you this and I consider this long copy, but some people would consider it short copy, but I'm going to read you this and then you can decide for yourself the copy. SES. I love a deal, especially one with black Friday in the title. Yet as a coach, I generally recommend against discounting because competing on price is a race to the bottom where no one wins. But I digress.

Back in April, I launched live stream three 65 a content planning calendar with three 65 live stream ideas for just $27 and over 7,430 entrepreneurs and counting bought it, but from now until Saturday, November the 30th I want to sweeten the pot. I'm bundling my best selling live stream calendar, my 21 day visibility challenge and a brand new Instagram story system we've been building over at AB HQ.

This has been monumental here for not only my business but for all of the business owners who have purchased and taken action on my programs. They've all made huge strides too and I want to celebrate with you. You can get access to all three of these programs today for just $27 and solve all of your content and visibility needs in 2020. There you have it. That was Allie Bjerk's long copy. In my view, this is long copy. Some people would show this as short copied. What I like is she got their attention with, I love a deal, especially one with black Friday in the title and it kind of ran this ad ran today as I'm recording it, it's Friday the 29th of November. This ad ran about a week ago, so kind of before the whole black Friday rush started. So I liked that she got in early with this.

She got people's attention with the black Friday and I love a deal. She's telling, she's saying there's a deal coming up. And then I love the last line that she says you can get access to all three of these programs today for just $27 and here's the beauty, the benefit. This is the catch phrase, the beauty, the black finale, and solve all of your content and visibility needs in 2020. Now who doesn't want that for just $27. So she's done a great job here. And the other example that I wanted to use that is super long copy that I'm not going to read out here in the podcast today is basically any ad by the guys from traffic and funnels. So if you just look up the guys from traffic and funnels, you will get retargeted as soon as you click on anything of theirs.

They are crazy retargeters. And you will see their ads everywhere once you're done. And you will see how good they are at writing ridiculously long copy in some of their ads that just goes on and on and on. But they're fabulous copywriters and it's a delight to read their copy. So that is what I have for you on copy. You need to get your copy ready and have it written. Think about the body copy. Think about the opening hook for your copy. Think about the headline you're going to use. Think about using benefits as opposed to features and think about your customer journey and what is the state that they want to be in after they have downloaded your freebie and speak to that. The next thing you need to get ready before you start setting up your ad or your images, you want to create at least two options for your ads.

And maybe not more than that. We are starting to see more and more in the agency that lace is more in terms of options for creative. So we might have two images and two videos and just taste those and use those. But remember the purpose of your image is to stop people from scrolling in the newsfeed, stop their fingers from scrolling through. So your image needs to grab their attention. It needs to make them feel that they associate with whatever is in the image. And what we're seeing more and more is the more native you can make it look and feel, the better the ad performs.

The overly produced, overly beautified, very professional photos with lots of text in it is a working lace and lace and the more casual, more informal ad images are working better and better. So for your conversion ads, I want you to have at least two square image options and use those square images on Facebook and Instagram.

If you think about the old Facebook images used to be a vertical landscape format and that doesn't take up a lot of space in the newsfeed. If you're scrolling on your phone, if you're scrolling on your phone, you want to think about the portrait orientation cause that will end up taking up more space in your newsfeed. So to solve that challenge, we just use square images for most of our ads because we like using the auto-placement option and if we have a square image it just goes straight onto Facebook. It goes straight on to Instagram, takes up enough space in the newsfeed on mobile so that you can stop that scroll and really get their attention. And then you may also want to think of some image options for Instagram stories. Facebook has a really handy aspect ratio tool that you can download and I have hooked it up to a easy link for you to remember.

It's called the shine show.com forward slash image tool and you can just go to that URL and you will find Facebook's aspect ratio tool which tells you exactly how big images should be in the different placement options that you have on Facebook. Then you should also be thinking about video. You want to be thinking about long video and short video and you want to be thinking about what the different placement restrictions are in terms of your video. Now again with video, this is something that is kind of like lace is more the more casual you can go. The lace produced the lace, overly formatted and overly edited. You can go, you can get with your videos the better, but try different angles. Try to, I have, I had a client that did a workshop on movement and one of the videos that I had her record was her lying down on the floor and standing up during the 15 seconds that her Instagram story video was on that video performed like gangbusters cause it's a weird angle and then it gets into like a comfortable speaking position for the viewer.

And so it gets their attention cause it's a bit different but then you become comfortable because she's talking to you from a stent standing up position. So think about ways that you can get started with something that's going to grab their attention really quickly. A different angle, a different bright color, a movement with your hands or a movement with your body or something.

I saw Stu McLaren did an Instagram story video where he did a backflip into the swimming pool that I thought was just genius. It was just, it's funny, it's cheerful, it's happy, and if you only have 15 seconds and five seconds of that is taken up by, by doing a backflip, you know the rest of those 10 seconds you are going to listen to what he says because he got your attention. It's just beautiful.

Facebook has a video tool where it gives you all the information, all the techie stuff that you need for the length of videos you need to create and the aspect ratios and all those things that are quite complicated, but they don't need to be.

If you just grab your phone, hold it in portrait position, hit record and speak to your ideal customer, you should be okay. Make sure that you keep your videos that goes on the Instagram newsfeed under two minutes. You can now also upload up to two minutes of videos into Instagram stories ads, but on Facebook stories it's still only going to be 15 seconds and your videos on Facebook newsfeed can be super mega long so don't don't worry about the limitation there but try to keep it short, especially if you're going to run the video to a cold audience that my friend is everything you need to get started. This is your ingredients lists, so just to go over it again, you need landing pages, landing page software and an E and a CRM or an email service provider. Something that's going to deliver your lead magnet into their inbox and that's going to allow you to collect email addresses.

You need pixels set up on your Facebook account and placed correctly on those landing pages. You need your custom conversions set up and in place. You need to know which audiences you are going to target. Make sure you target a large audiences, millions of people.

For cold ads, you need to have copy written copy that are going to convert copy and a few different options. You need short copy and long copy and you need images, you need a couple of different options of images that's going to stop the scroll. You need video and you need some video. That is also going to make them double tag. Do a double take, look. Again, pay attention and listen for a few seconds to you. So there you have it. Now you have all the building blocks you need to get started with Facebook ads and put your list building on autopilot.

So I want you to imagine it's a year from now and you took what you learned here today and implemented it at only $20 a day. That's $600 a month you can get there. You can definitely get there and imagine for that $20 a day you got five people to opt into your email list every single day they need one year you will add 1,825 people to your email list and because you're sending out regular content to your list, those almost 2000 people will be primed and ready to buy when you launch your first or next online course.

So make sure you download the list builders complete checklist for setting up Facebook and Instagram ads where you can go back through everything and there's even more information in there than I've shared with you on the podcast today and go through it, set up your ads and let me know how you go getting started with your list building efforts.

Join me next week on episode four of the shine show when we're going to talk about why goal setting is not working for you and how you can change that.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had to fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

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02. How To Get Started With Facebook Ads Without Wasting Your Money

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02. How To Get Started With Facebook Ads Without Wasting Your Money

10 December 2019 | By Salome Schillack

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

I asked my social media followers to tell me what their biggest fear is around getting started with Facebook ads.

Like a 1990’s boy band, they all harmoniously agreed that it is not knowing how to get started without wasting money.

On today’s episode, I will help you know exactly

  • what type of ad to start with when you’re just starting out
  • How much money to spend on that ad
  • How to know if it’s working or not
  • What you definitely do not want to do when you’re just starting out with Facebook ads
  • One surprising thing about running Facebook ads for list building that even experienced launchers need to know

When you’ve listened to the show, send me a DM on Instagram and tell me what you’re going to do to get started with Facebook and Instagram ads to put your list building efforts on autopilot.

Hello and welcome to episode number two of the Shine Show and today's episode is all about how to get started with Facebook ads without wasting your money.

Recently on a Facebook post, I asked my followers, I said, I'm curious what is the first thing that comes to mind when I say use Facebook ads instead of social media to build your email list and I want to share a few of the answers that I got from some people on Facebook. Jillian said, not knowing what's current based practice so as to not waste money. I totally agree with that. She said, lack of knowledge and lack of trust and they not being confident to waste money if I can't work it all out successfully. Totally agree with that. Kate said, fear of wasting money. I see a pattern here. Do you guys see it? Melanie said, "money!".

And then I asked her what about money? And she said lots of fear around how ensuring you're doing it right so you don't waste money. So you see the same thing comes up over and over. Alicia said money. And again, I asked her, what do you mean by money? She said putting money in and not being confident enough with Facebook ads to know if I can make it a good investment. So my friends, you see the train, you see the pattern here.

People are incredibly fearful of giving Facebook their money and I don't blame them because here's a scenario I'm sure everyone is familiar with. You put up an amazing post on Facebook and it goes viral, kind of inside your community. Everyone loves it. And then Facebook gives you that little tempting button that says, ah, this post has performed better than all the other posts on your feed.

You can boost it for $20 and reach 20,000 people. And of course, the first, you're incredibly excited about this, and it makes you feel so good and exhilarated. So you hit the boost post button and then the next day you wake up and you get that sinking feeling because you realize you have just wasted $20 on Facebook ads because you gave Facebook your money an emotional place instead of from a strategic place. But here's the thing. How are you supposed to know what that strategic place is if you don't have the strategy in place or the skills to then build out a successful Facebook ads campaign so that you can measure your results and actually know if it worked, if it didn't work, or just know how to interpret the results you got so that you can then make decisions and turn it into an ad that actually gives you a return on investment.

So I totally understand what you guys are feeling, Julian newish. Kate Malani. Alicia. Melanie, I think that's Melanie. I totally understand what you guys are feeling here. So on today's episode you are going to learn how to spend your first $5 on Facebook ads and what the result is realistically that you can expect from spending $5 a day on Facebook ads. We're also going to explore when the right time is to start using Facebook ads to build your email list. So if this is something that you have been dying to know and you are one of these people who responded to my Facebook post or you feel like the people here they in, stay tuned because this episode is for you. When you get started with Facebook ads, there is one very important strategy that I want you to understand and this is a strategy that runs throughout every single thing you're going to do.

Now when I say strategy, I mean I really mean a bigger picture plan as opposed to tactics which are more implementation based things. Tactics tend to be what we do. Strategies is more the why we do it and how we do it and how it fits into the big picture. My friends over at digital marketer created the customer value journey is what they call it, and it's, it's, it's a, it's a strategy. It's a principle, a marketing principle really that's been around for a very long time, but they've just given it a cool name and created a template that you can use and you can check out the customer value journey@digitalmarketer.com forward slash blog forward slash customer value journey.

What the customer value journey really is about is it is about deliberately and consciously creating a marketing journey where you're taking your ideal customers from the first moment they meet you, that hello moment, the moment when they lock eyes on you and they go, wow, who's that?

I need more of that in my life. So the first moment of engaging with you, of seeing you for the first time and you getting their attention to then becoming a subscriber on your email list. So the stuff that they see on on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, on social media, on your podcast, on your blog, on your video blog, that is so good that they go, I need more of this person in my life. I'm going to subscribe to their email list and make sure that I don't ever miss a beat of what they have to share it with me. And then the next phase of the customer value is the point where they convert to a sale. So we've got engage, subscribe, convert. Now digital marketer has a few other things in there, but I have simplified it to engage, subscribe, and convert.

And in a an online courses business or a digital courses business, you can think of it as engagement is what usually tends to happen in our free content. We engage people with our Instagram posts, we engage them with our Insta stories, with our Facebook posts, with our Facebook lives, with our podcasts, our YouTube channels. Those are all engagement sort of content.

Then we create a freebie and awesome freebie list builder, a lead magnet, a checklist, a cheat sheet, a blueprint of some kind, an ebook, something that's going to give them a slightly bigger win, slightly bigger result that will get them, get them a little bit more traction than what we can get them on social media alone. And so they want that and therefore they are willing to offer up their email address. Now while they're offering up their email address, they're also offering up more of their attention and more of their time.

So the subscribed phase of this is where we add value to them through some kind of a freebie that we give them. And the convert side of this, this is our live launches, this is our webinars, our three part video series launches, our five day challenge launches, our live launches, anything that is a, I call it a sales mechanism, an event we create that starts with some kind of a value, content based value we give them and results in them handing over their credit cards and purchasing our program.

So in a nutshell for digital course creators, we go from engage to subscribe to convert and there are journeys within our journeys. It's like Russian dolls. We can create journeys within journeys, within journeys. It's a bit of a mind band, but we get to do that and the better we get at building these customer value journeys, the better our sales results are and the better our connection with our audiences is and usually when a client works with us and we see the client's ads struggle to work, one of the first things we look at is have we created a good enough customer value journey where the clients are taken on a deliberate pathway that goes from engage to subscribe to convert.

Now on today's podcast, I am going to be talking to two people who are in different places in their business. The one person specifically that I want to speak to today is my list builders. I love my list builders. List builders are people who have been building their audience. You are social media foodie and you show up on social media every day, or at least five days a week adding value to your audience. You are creating weekly blogs or video blogs or podcasts, and you're adding value to people. You're getting to know and understand the pain points of your audience. And perhaps you're still working on your online course, or you've already created a course and you're making tweaks and changes, but you're somewhere in the starting points of building an audience, building a following, getting in front of people and and showing them what you have to offer.

So stay tuned. If you're a list builder, I'm going to teach you how to get started with ads.

And then the second type of person that I am going to be talking to today on this podcast episode are my live launchers. Now, my live launches are people who already have some kind of an email list going and you already have your regular weekly content and you're in the, in your, like you've kind of found your groove. And every week your podcast episode comes out, your blog post comes out, your video blog comes out you have an offer. Maybe two offers could be a membership and a mastermind or maybe it's an online course and a mastermind or something of that sorts. And you launch a few times a year, you're getting about six figures income from your live launches and you are probably feeling a little bit stressed because you need to build your team and scale your business and you're not 100% sure of what exactly is working, what is not working.

But I'm going to help you start getting some predictable results with your ads today too. So the third type of person that we deal a lot within the agency are the scalers. Scalers are people who have already reached maybe the high six low seven figures. And you just want more consistency in your results. You just want to be able to rinse and repeat your live launches and make the small tweaks that are going to get you the big results so that you can grow and scale your business more predictably and actually strategically by growth for your business with paid traffic.

My scalers, I'm going to invite you to stay tuned because I'm sure you're going to learn something, but in episode five entitled the 10 key questions to ask yourself before your next live launch. I'm going to dive deep into this for all of the scalers so that you know what the most important things are that you need to look at if you want that consistency in your business so that you can predictably by growth, which means if you know how to predictably by growth, you can basically say, I want to make $10 million next year, and if you have your numbers in place and you know your conversion rates, there's no reason why you can't do it by me.

Okay, so let's get started with this customer value journey for list builders. Anyone who is just starting out building an audience, getting free content out there and hasn't really run many Facebook ads yet. Where do you start and is it even possible to start with $10 or $5 a day? Right? So you are going to want to start with engagement ads. And there's a reason I say this and the reason I say this is because you probably perhaps don't have a huge budget for Facebook ads. And like all of my friends at the start of this that I mentioned at the start of this podcast, you are really scared of wasting money. Now you guys will remember in February, I hope you remember, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm the only one who paid attention to this. But in February nine 2019 in February, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg came on the air on the waves and said something to the sorts of, the algorithm is completely changing and from now on we will only be favoring the content of friends and family because that's what people are interested in and they just don't want to see the promotional material.

Marketers are constantly putting in front of them. And we want to keep the newsfeed a happy place. We want to make sure that our viewers, our engagers, our scrollers stay on the platform. So marketers be gone and friends and family come in their place. And what Mark was really saying is he wants engagement. He wants the people who are looking at our content to really engage with it, which is great because when people engage with our content, that means that we've hit a nerve. It means that we have hit a point where they love what we've got. They're laughing, they're liking it, they're sharing it with their friends, they're hitting a like, like button. They're commenting, they're getting involved. That is the juice. That's what we want. That's the gold. That is a two way conversation instead of a marketer dumping one way staff onto an audience.

So what Facebook really is looking for is engagement on all of our accounts. And I can confess this to you guys. While I was growing the agency, I never did a lot of social media. I never posted, I never ran ads for myself. And my account became completely dormant, like stagnated. Really bad mojo was going on there and then when all of a sudden I started running ads again cause I was promoting something, I was getting insanely high conversions. It was like a running uphill. It was just impossible. I looked at my client account and I'm like, but they're not struggling.

Why am I struggling so much? And I realized it's because there's no engagement going on in my, on my accounts. And since then I have started running engagement ads on for my own account and we as a rule run engagement ads for all of our clients in the agency because the clients that I've worked with for two, two and a half years, I have noticed that their conversions come down.

The cost for them to get a lead is lower now than it was two years ago if we have consistently been running engagement ads. So here's the thing, engagement ads is not a strategy that's going to give you a return on investment tomorrow. It is the long game. It is basically just giving Facebook what Facebook wants so that you do not end up paying an arm and a leg for conversions. And the beauty of it is, what I've found is as soon as I start running engagement campaigns, my engagement goes up and that's what we want for social media. Nobody likes speaking into the void. Nobody likes talking to a big black hole.

So when you put something up on Facebook, when you put something up on Instagram and you've got engagement ads running in the background, all of a sudden magically your audience comes alive and they start engaging back with you.

So what I want you to do, go and do right now, is to start running your based social media posts. And you don't have to choose many. You can choose one or two and just run them as engagement ads to a cold audience for $5 a day, ongoing ad consistently that's going to cost you $150 a month. If you compare that to some of the subscriptions that you've seen, you know that subscription programs that you're on, like Kajabi and lead pages and Canva and you name it. We have so many, like I go through mine every so often and I just ended up canceling three or four every time I go through it. Think about where you can like save $150 a month and maybe put that towards just running engagement ads on Facebook and Instagram to a cold audience so that you can start building up the mojo on your account.

What you'll see happen is you'll grow your following faster. You'll have a lot of warm audiences to retarget when you are finally ready to start building your email list and your ad account will build up that good juicy mojo so you don't start from scratch with conversion ads that are going to cost you a fortune to get people onto your email list. So start small, start with engagement ads, run them consistently low and slow in the background all the time. You are going to thank me for this and please, if you do do this and you see some magic result happening, let me know. I want to hear about this because I firmly believe in this and I see this over and over and over again in our client's account and I'm seeing it in my own account too. The sooner you can get used to spending money on Facebook ads, the better off you will be.

So start with is $5 a day. This is kind of a mindset shift that I really want my newbies to make. You have got to start thinking about Facebook ads as a monthly budget item as soon as you can. Trust me, it is not easier to start spending $1,000 a month on Facebook ads when you haven't even spent $100 a month. So just think of it as a necessary investment in your business. It's one of the investments that is going to pay off the in the most generous way and it's one of the investments that you will see. Mike, the biggest impact on your bottom line because let's face it, we need Facebook and Instagram ads to grow our digital course businesses. Now, once you are selling your course and you're making a bit of money, then I want you to start moving to the subscribed phase.

So remember we have three phases, engage, subscribe and convert. Then I want you to move to the subscribe phase where you're going to take your awesome freebie, your lead magnet that will help them get a quick win and you're going to use that freebie to grow your email list. And while you're growing your email list every single week, you're blogging or podcasting or video blogging to add value to that email list and you're building your relationship with that email list. If you're still working on your online course, you're still building that course.

Then this is one of the most important things you can do because while you're building your email list in the background, your free content is nurturing those people. It's building the relationship they're going to, they're going to engage with you or have a two way conversation with you and they're going to come back to you and tell you exactly what their pain points are and what the outcomes are that they want.

And that's the stuff you're going to use in your sales copy. So that's why it's important to keep this weekly content going while you are working on your course and then build your email lists. Now the question is how much should you spend on building your email list? And the short answer is spend at least $20 a day. And here's why I say that, and this is a bit different to what we used to say a couple of years ago. And that's just because the algorithm has changed so much and the algorithm has matured. So now the algorithm is really good at going out and finding you the conversions, the peel, the people who are going to convert to your subscribers, but what the algorithm needs in order to convert those subscribers are people who are the right fit for your conversion. And the only way that the algorithm knows that these people are the right fit is when there are conversions.

So it's kind of conversions beget conversions and let's just say, let's just assume for a second that your conversions cost $5 each, which is not a horrendous amount in the digital courses spice, but it's also not insanely cheap. So let's decide. Costs you $5 to get one person on your list. You're going to get four people a day from $20 a day in ad spin. Those four people are going to give the algorithm enough juice, enough detail, enough information about the people who are likely to convert and the algorithm will vain optimize faster and you have to keep your ads on for at least three days to get that algorithm really dialed in and then just keep it running. If you've, if you have a winner and it all works, just keep it running at $20 a day. Keep going. Do not stop at $20 a day.

You are spending $600 over the course of a month. Now if you think that is an insane amount of money yeah, if you're not making any money in your business yet, maybe it is, but I would encourage you to sell something and put that money towards list building because your email list is going to be the thing that is going to make you money. So if I told you that you can put in six, $700 for a few, six or $700 for a few months into Facebook ads, and then when you launch, you have a launch radio list, wouldn't that motivate you to get going faster? Wouldn't that drive you to make that offer sooner to get that webinar done, to get those three part video series recorded to make even a small offer to see if they want to convert? I am sure that it would.

So that is how you move to the subscribe phase and you get started. Now the next phase is the convert phase and the convert phase is the phase where we are launching. So for those of you who are just list building at this stage, you are not going to run any convert ads. And if you do, if you do go into a launch, the only convert ad that I want you to do to run is a retargeting ad to people who have been to your sales page. These are relatively inexpensive because those audience tend to be quite small. So you're just going to set up an ad that retargets people who've been to your sales page to remind them to come back and buy your thing that they were interested in. So, but, but you're probably mostly gonna use your email list for conversion strategy.

Your conversion will happen in an email sequence or something like that. Probably not a webinar, a three board video series, or a challenge or or, or any of those bigger launch mechanisms. So that refrains is how you get started with Facebook ads if you are a list builder without wasting your money. Now let's look at how to get started with Facebook ads without wasting your money.

If you're a launcher, and I know this might be a little bit of a contradiction to say you're a launcher, but you're also starting out with Facebook ads. But here's the thing that I see a lot is there are a lot of launchers out there who are making six figures from their launches, but they've been around for a while and because they've been around for the while, for a while, they started out when it was still possible to run ads only during a launch and not the race of the year.

And now they're looking at me saying, why are my launches getting smaller and smaller? Or why am I getting the same result with my launches? Even though I'm spending more on ads? So if you're a launcher and this is resonating with you, then this is for you. This is how you start ramping up your ads without making any, without losing money on Facebook ads. So for engagement ads, you're going to do the same thing, the exact same thing as the list builders. You're going to choose a handful of your based engagement ads. Those ads that show your values, that show what you stand for, that demonstrates something about the, the solution that you have. And that showcases your, your beliefs, your values, the intangible things. Like it's the things that makes people feel good or it is the beliefs that you can draw a line in the sand and you can say, I stand by this no matter what.

It's polarizing. It's maybe it's, it will divide people into either they love you or their height, you they either become your followers instantly or they talk about you because they don't like you, which is also good. But just pick some of those engagement ads that have performed really well on social media and start running those. Now, are you going to start with $5 a day?

Depends how much profit you have in your business. If you have a good profit margin, you might start with $5, but I would encourage you to go a little bit higher. The more you can spend on engagement ads, the more warm audiences you will have in your business. The more people you will have that have had multiple touch points with you before you make an offer. So that means lower conversion costs when you list build lower conversion costs when you launch.

So start with your engagement ads as soon as possible. Use the ads that use the posts that have performed based on social media and run them to a cold audience. Then when you switch, then when you go to your subscribe ads, you are going to run these. Now I have to put my, I have to put my like school teacher hat, my angry mom face. I have to put my angry mom face on my angry mom face to all of my launchers. You have got to build your email list with Facebook ads 12 months of the year capeesh the only time you're allowed to switch your list building ads off is when you are in a launch and you might compete with your own list building ads during your launch. That's the only time you're allowed to switch your list building off. So in between launches, you can run all the list builders you love, all the realist builders that you know add value to your audience, but keep the customer value journey in mind.

You want to keep in mind what promotions have you got coming up down the track and run list builders that's going to start that conversation, the conversation that's going to end in a conversion in a sale at the end of your launch. And then when you get into about eight weeks leading up to your launch, you want your list builders to line up perfectly with your launch and with the offer you're making when you open your doors.

This list builder, as Amy Porterfield always says, has to show your ideal client what they have to know, understand and believe to be in the perfect place to purchase your course. So just think about this for a moment. Has the list builders you've been running in the past being the entry point to the conversation that ends in your ideal customer? Knowing, understanding and believing that they're in the right place to purchase your course.

And if the answer is no, then why are you running that list building ad and why are you spending money on it? And sometimes what I've seen is people would say, yeah, but it leads into some tiny little sale that you know, a $20 sale and there's $20 sales are doing well. And so I'm just keeping this thing running because it's a $20 sale, my friend, you are counting pennies while you're leaving the dollars on the table. What's that expression? I think I totally messed up that expression just now. But you know what I mean?

When you're not in launch mode, you need to spend at least $20 per day on list builders and when you are in prelaunch, push that up as much as you can. Then your budget allows. And then of course when you go into launch mode, you got to have a healthy budget to get enough people on that webinar to get enough people on that three board video series to get enough people into the challenge or the live launch.

Make sure you have a healthy budget. But when you sit down now and you do your planning for 2020 think about distributing your Facebook ad costs to be between 10 and 20% of what your revenue goal is. So we are often very, it's very easy for us to go, Oh, I'm gonna make $1 million this year, but what percentage of that million dollars do you want as profit? And then what percentage of that million dollars are you going to have to spend in ads to make that million dollars? And I'm willing to bet if you want to make $1 million, then you're going to need to spend between a hundred and $200,000 at least on Facebook ads. So how does that pan out in your 12 month plan? How are you going to distribute that hundred or $200,000 over the course of the next 12 months so that you hit that million dollar goal? You are not going to know these things if you don't know your numbers.

So that is why it's so important to look at your customer value journey. Go back and see how much it is costing you to get in front of new people, to get them on your email list and then to convert them.

There you have it. That is how you engage people and then subscribe people to your email list and get started with Facebook ads without wasting your money. Now if you are thinking Salome you did not cover the convert phase of the customer value journey, then you would be absolutely right and that's because is a major topic and the topic lends itself to the live launchers and also to the scalers and the people who have high six figure, maybe low seven figure businesses who are looking to buy growth for their business in a more strategic and more predictable way. In episode five the episode is entitled the 10 key questions to ask yourself before your next live.

We are going to dive very deep into how to create customer value journeys using Facebook ads during a live launch. And that is definitely for you if you are a launcher, someone with a six figure business doing live launches or if you're a scaler, if you have a high six low seven figure business and you are just looking for a way to more predictably grow your business and by growth from paid traffic with your business. So if you've enjoyed this episode, I have a free gift for you. You can download a special guide to accompany this podcast called the three types of ads. Every course creator needs to have bigger launches and grow and scale faster. And in that little ebook you're going to learn exactly how to create high converting engagement and list building ads and more. And it also has a really handy swipe file of some of our favorite ads that demonstrate good examples of engagement ads and good examples of conversion ads. And you can go to www.theshineshow.com forward slash zero zero two to get your copy of three types of ads. Every course creator needs to have bigger launches and grow and scale faster. That is it for to die my friends. Thank you so much for joining me. Go and grab your freebie three types of ads every course creator needs so that you can have bigger launches and grow and scale faster.

We'll see you again next week. Have a great week everyone. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you had to fund, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

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174. Some Thoughts On Making Lots Of Money

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173. 3 Reasons NOW Is The Best Time To Start A Digital Courses Business with Amy Porterfield

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172. 25 Biggest Lessons In Online Marketing I Learned From Amy Porterfield

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171. Social Media: One Thing That Makes All The Effort Worthwhile

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170. How to Choose the Right Name for Your Online Course

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169. Content Planning For Posts VS Content For Your Course And Launches

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168. Managing Your Money As A Small Business Owner with Darcie Milfeld

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167. 3 Lies You Were Told About Hiring An Ads Manager

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166. How To Create Your Online Course Faster with Gina Onativia

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165. The Only Way Low Dollar Offers Are Working Today

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164. New Ad Targeting Options That Are Working Now

75. 5 Numbers That Tell You Your Ads Are Working

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75. 5 Numbers That Tell You Your Ads Are Working

27 October 2020 | By Salome Schillack

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

I have this little knack for reading people's minds when it comes to a very particular subject: Facebook ads.

I'll read yours right now, through the screen. Ready?

If I say to you, "Put money into your Facebook ads campaigns to grow your audience and sell to them effectively." I BET you're thinking...

"Sure, I would, IF I knew that it was going to work."

And you're smart for thinking that way. Because why sink so much money into something if it's just making you feel like a crazy person throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks?

Nope! None of that here. Now if I say to you, "What if I could tell you exactly what you needed to know to tell if your Facebook ads were working?"

Then I bet you'd be thinking, "YES PLEASE!"

Here you go. Tune in to today's episode to learn the 5 numbers that tell you if your ads are working. If you're an online marketer about to dive into Facebook ads with both feet, you need to listen to this episode so you know how to do it successfully.

Once you've listened, be sure to send me a message on Facebook or Instagram with what you think of the episode and leave me a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to episode number 75 of The Shine Show. In today's show, we're going to look at the five numbers that tell you if your ads are working.

Recently, my family and I went on a two week vacation and I have to be honest and say that the first few days was pretty hard for me to relax. I have already told you, if you've listened to some of the episodes, I've told you that in the month of August, I kind of felt like my brain was broken and that I could not string two words together properly. I couldn't string two thoughts together.

I knew I needed a holiday and I knew I needed to relax. I also know that before COVID happened, I never ever used to read the news or listen to the news. And then as COVID started to unfold, I started craving news and I think it's just our brain's way of trying to control things, raving information, searching out information in an attempt to have all the facts so that our brain can fool itself into thinking that it is in control, which of course we are never in control.

I found myself struggling to relax while I was on holiday. And I made a decision to delete Instagram, to delete Facebook, to delete my email app. I was even considering deleting Safari off of my phone so I couldn't get hold of the news.

Luckily, my self discipline kicked in and I prevented myself from checking the news. But I found myself, even though I deleted Insta and Facebook and wasn't checking news and wasn't reading emails, I still... It's like it left a ginormous gap in my mental space which I kind of slowly needed to ease out of. And it felt like torture sitting there next to a beach, next to a swimming pool, sitting there. I would read my book for a while and then my brain starts going, "How about we check the news?" And I'm like, "Nope, we're not going to check the news."

"How about we check Facebook?" "No, we're not going to check..." "How about we check Instagram?" And then I would watch something on TV and then my brain goes, "How about we check the news?" And it just continued like that for about a week. I made a decision that I'm just going to ease myself into it. So I downloaded one of these quest games.

I downloaded a game called Murder in the Alps and I started playing the game. And initially I felt incredibly guilty for lying on my back playing a silly game on my phone, but it was exactly what I needed to keep my brain from jumping back into work mode and jumping back into searching for news mode.

Now, the way that murder in the Alps work is you are the main character and you arrive in a hotel in the Alps in the middle of a snow storm. Don't ask me how she got there, but she got there. In the middle of a snow storm, she arrives at a hotel only for the hotel owner to tell her that a murder has just been committed. It's a little bit Angela Lansbury, Murder, She Wrote because this lady is like everywhere she goes, people get murdered and she has to figure out who did it.

So she has to follow the clues and figure out who's the murderer before more people get murdered and every single morning she wakes up, there's been a new murder. Now, the thing with this game is you don't have all the information at the start. Each time before you get another piece of information, you have to go to a scene and inside this scene, play a little hide and seek game. Like you get a list of 10 things and you have to find these hidden objects in the scene.

And once you have found all 10 of the hidden objects, then one of those ten things is going to be useful to you in uncovering who the murderer is. This was perfect for relaxation and I spent hours playing and eventually I started relaxing and my craving for news and social media started to die off and I was able to switch off.

I highly recommend that by the way. Take Facebook and Instagram off of your phone and stop checking news. It's a mind bugger for the first few days, but I feel freer than ever and more relaxed.

The reason I'm telling you about my game is because I think Facebook ads can be a little bit like a murder mystery game sometimes. You watch as the blood flows out of your bank account but you haven't yet found all the clues to know exactly who it is that murdered your leads.

Am I right? You need to solve a few mysteries before you're going to know exactly why your ads are tanking, which results in your bank account getting drained like blood flowing out of one of the murder mystery characters.

You need to find the clues first and to die on the show, I guess I am going to share with you these clues so that you know when you look at your ads and you see a murder has been committed, you are able to go and search for the micro clues to figure out what has gone wrong.

The first micro clue, the first number you want to look at is what we call the CPM. The CPM stands for the cost per 1,000. Apparently, M is the number, the Roman numeral for 1,000. I didn't know that until I started working with ads. So CPM stands for cost per 1,000.

And here's the thing about CPM, is Facebook is kind of protective of their newsfeed. And they only make impressions of ads in people's newsfeeds if they believe the ad is good quality. If Facebook feels that your ad is not great quality, then you pay for it in terms of your CPM because they simply don't show it to as many people.

You might end up paying $20-30-40-50 to reach a thousand people. So in other words, to get your ad shown to in a thousand newsfeeds, whereas if you have a good ranking in your account and you have a good ad, then Facebook will show it to more people because they see people respond to this ad, people react, it gets a reaction, people like it. And so then they are more eager to show it to their audience because remember their audience are the eyeballs that are watching and they don't want to show bad ads to their audience.

So how does Facebook know if an ad is good or not? There's a few ways. One of those ways is engagement. Now you have heard me talk about engagement so many times that by now you should understand that the currency with which Facebook measures the quality of our ads is always engagement.

Because remember, Facebook wants content from friends and family, which means they want content that invokes emotions, that people like, that people share, that people comment on. So they want engagement. That's how they measure it. That's one way.

And there can be engagement on your actual ad and that will help you, but there's also building engagement on your account. And you do that simply by running engagement ads to your cold audiences, which then stimulates the engagement on your overall on all of your pages, your Facebook page, your Instagram account, stimulates the engagement on your account, brings up the quality of your account and Facebook goes, "Yeah, this person creates great content. Let's put this in front of more people." So you're using engagement ads to build up your account mojo.

What you should be aiming for in terms of a goal for your CPM is somewhere between $10 and $20 and make sure that you're giving Facebook large enough audiences to find people who will convert. So large enough, I mean, 2 million and more.

(10:26):

You will find that when you're running ads to your warm audiences, your CPM might be higher. It might be $40-50-60-70 and that's okay, because remember now you are looking for leads in a much, much smaller pool so Facebook has to work harder in order to get you to a thousand impressions.

If there is only a thousand people in your audience and you're trying to get conversions, you're going to pay a lot more to get in front of all those people than when there's millions of people and the algorithm can literally easily find thousands of them to put your ad in front of. Keep that in mind, your CPM will be higher for warmer audiences but aim for the cold audiences to get it between $10 and $20 and try to get your audience bigger than 2 million people.

That way, the algorithm has a better chance to get those people for you. Number one is your CPM, your cost per 1000. The second thing you need to look at is the cost per unique link click. What that means is if we talk about link clicks, it means Facebook is measuring the number of people who clicked the link in your ad either on the call to action button or in the copy of your ad.

We look at unique link clicks because it's possible for someone to click multiple times in the same ad and that's not useful to us. And we also ideally don't want to pay for people who click on our stuff over and over. We want to look at unique link clicks because that tells us how many unique people clicked on the link. So they read the ad, they responded to the ad and then they took the action that we wanted them to take.

Now, in order to see cost per unique link click, you may need to customize the results you're looking at in the ads manager. Facebook defaults to showing us the cost per link click when we sort our information to show us performance and clicks. But we are not looking for cost per link click because it includes anyone who clicked multiple times. We want to make sure we're looking at cost per unique link click and your goal here is to aim for anything between 50 cents and $2 really.

It's harder here to say exactly how much you should aim for because it's possible that you could pay $2 to get someone to click on your ad, but it's the perfect person. And if your landing page converts at 80%, you end up paying maybe $2.50 for that lead but your click is more expensive and that's okay as long as you know you have the right audience.

The second number to pay attention to is your cost per unique link click.

Number three is your link click-through rate. What does that mean? That means that out of the 1,000 people who's newsfeed Facebook put your ad in, so in other words, out of the 1000 impressions you got, what percentage of those people clicked through from your ad to your landing page? That number to me is more important than the cost per unique link click.

The link click-through rate should be at least 1%, because what that means is out of a thousand people, at least 10 of them clicked on your ad. You can imagine if you're paying to get in front of thousands and thousands and thousands of people and only 1% of them are clicking on your ad to go to your landing page and then your landing page is converting at 50%, that means if your CPM is about $10 and 1% clicks on the ad, that's 10 clicks you get. So now you're paying a dollar per click.

Then you hope your landing page converts at 50% and now you're paying $2 per lead. That's how you can kind of work it out. But if this is to you just remember link click-through rate is the percentage of people who saw your ad, who is also clicking on the link. And keep the numbers in mind, you want it to be above 1% because 1% out of a thousand is only 10. That's not a lot of people.

You want to make sure that you pay attention to these numbers and get them as high as possible. And the way that you increase your link click-through rate is in two ways: either you are going to improve your copy so that your copy is clear and tell people exactly why they should click on your link or you're going to look at your targeting. Your targeting and your copy should be a match.

If you're targeting the right people with the right message, you're going to get a link click-through rate higher than 1%. If you have the right message and the wrong audience, that's not going to work. If you have the wrong message and the right audience, you're still not going to have a match there.

Link click-through right, 1% or more and it's an indication of the match between the copy in your ad and the audience that you're targeting. It's an indication of how well they respond to it.

The next number you need to be paying attention to is the landing page conversion rate. This is the rate of people who clicked to your landing page, what percentage of those ended up as leads. And you work this out with the calculation, the number of leads you have over the number of landing page views.

And again, you can go into the ads manager and customize the columns where you're viewing the results of your ads and just type in the customization lending page views. And Facebook brings up the actual number of people who looked at your landing page so long as that page has a pixel on it.

So then you're just going to go, "How many people opted in for my freebie or my lead magnet?" And divide that by the number of people who clicked on your landing page and you have the percentage that your landing page is converting at. And your goal here is to aim for about 45 to 50%.

I have a landing page that is filled with testimonials from happy clients and that landing page converts at 80%. It's so good because we have a retargeting ad set up to re-target people who did not opt in and that retargeting ad is not even getting any traction because that landing page converts so well.

So here's the hot tip for you, if you want to increase conversions on a landing page, include some testimonials from some of your happy students in there.

Then there's finally two other magic numbers that I want to share with you that you need to make sure that you're checking. The one is $25 per day. If you're running any kind of list building ads, any kind of lead magnet ads, you need to be spending at least $25 a day. And here's the other magic number: three days.

You have to leave the ad alone for three days. Make sure you don't touch it. Don't come in and check it every time because you are going to drive yourself crazy because it goes up and then down and then up and then down in those first three days and by the end of the three days, if you have spent $25 each day and you have the right audiences, you should have a favorable result. But don't make a call about your ads until they have run for three full days.

Now, if you are using campaign budget optimization or CBO, as they call it and as I teach my students to use, then also make sure that you only have one ad set per campaign. And the reason we do that is because when Facebook is distributing that money from campaign level and you have multiple ad sets in that campaign and those ad sets are not all created equal, then the money from campaign level is going to be distributed into the ad set that will get the fastest result. You are no longer creating a split test, you are in fact just making the algorithm choose a winner faster.

And we don't always want that to happen. Sometimes we want to make sure we are comparing one audience to another one and you need to compare them for a full three days, each one in its own campaign with its own budget set at campaign level so that you can actually compare apples with apples.

All right. That was a lot of stats. I haven't done an episode where I go through geeky numbers like this in a while. I hope you've been taking notes and if you haven't that's okay because you can go always go to our show notes page at shineandsucceed.com and you will find the show notes where we have all these numbers for you there.

To recap, you're going to look at your CPM, your cost per 1,000 impressions and you want to aim between $10 and $20 there. You are going to look at your cost per unique link click and anything between 50 cents and $2 is acceptable.

You're going to look at your link click-through rate, which should be higher than 1%. You're going to look at your landing page conversion rate, which you want at least 45% but aim for more and then you're going to make sure you run your ads at $25 a day for a minimum of three days.

Now, remember just like all those little clues I had to find inside my murder mystery game, it's not the micro games inside the game that matters most, it's finding the killer that matters.

Just like with ads, I want you to use these micro numbers to tell you the bigger story. Let it help you narrow down where the problem can be. But if you're happy with your lead cost and you're getting a good result, then you have no problem. Then don't mess with it and don't get too bogged down on finding clues for things that are actually working really well.

Now, I hope that that is going to get you started with your list building ads. I want you to go and create your own list building ads, get them up and if you don't know how, you can use the free five day video training we have to show you how to get your first list building ad up in just five days and you'll find that at shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. Or you can just go to the show notes of the show and you'll find that link there as well.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

 

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

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72. How To Make Money with $7 Sales

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72. How To Make Money With $7 Sales

06 October 2020 | By Salome Schillack

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

​Have you seen those mini $7 offers floating around and thought to yourself, "How is anyone making money from that?"

This tiny sales are really all the rage these days, and just like everything else trendy, some people will pull it offer better than others.

Tune in to this week's episode to find out:

- what you need to know before you get started

- how to actually make money (it's a secret that might not be what you expected!)

- which Facebook ads you need to run

- how much to spend on your campaign

- and the system you need to put into place for success.

Today we're going to talk about those little, teeny tiny $7 offers everyone is seeing on Facebook and Instagram, and I'm going to teach you how to make money with your $7 sales ads.

These tiny offers and mini sales are really all the rage these days. And like most things that are all the rage (like giant wavy fringes in the eighties, wearing midriff tops in the nineties, or TikTok right now) it is something that a lot of people are going to try, but not everyone will pull it off quite like Melanie Griffith, Tyra Banks or Jason Derulo.

So how do you successfully sell a $7 mini course to a cold audience using Facebook ads? The first thing you should be sure of before you start running these $7 ads is you need to know where to find your audience before you start running these ads. We had this conversation in The Launch Lounge the other day about these $7 offers and someone was struggling to get their lead magnet ad cost down. And so she asked me if it would make more financial sense for her to run a $7 offer, where at least when someone opts in, she makes a little bit of the money back instead of a free lead magnet. Seems like a really good logical conclusion to come to.

And we looked at her lead magnet and the ads, and it became clear that she hadn't quite nailed her offer for her lead magnet yet, and was still a little bit unsure of how to write the copy for the ad that would entice her ideal customer to click on the ad and go to the landing page and then opt in. So while it seems tempting to want to create a shortcut to making money with these tiny offers, what these offers don't do is they don't help you better understand how to make an offer to your audience that is going to convert.

You get to do that very inexpensively when you use engagement ads to see what resonates with your cold audiences or when you're running list building ads, and you get immediate feedback on your offer simply by looking at your ad results for your lead magnet. So you have to know where your audiences are and you have to be fairly confident in knowing how to speak to them and make them an offer, before you want to run any of these $7 offers and replace one of your lead magnets with them.

The second thing I would love you to understand is that you're not going to make money with this $7 offer. In fact, you're probably going to lose money on the front-end. The money in these offers are in the up-sells. The way that these offers make you money is in that there is an order bump immediately when you click on the buy button. What that means is that there's a little checkbox below, usually below the buy now button that says something like, would you also like X, Y, Z fabulous thing for $17? And you just tick the box, yes or no.

So you click that button and it takes you to an order form where you check out and once you hit the thank you page, after you've bought this first thing, you are then offered another up-sell. And this could maybe be some amazing resource that you're getting offered for say, $47. And because you've just bought something, your credit card is quite hot right now, your buy finger is on a roll, you add the $47 thing to your cart. And once you've added that to your cart, then there's another offer for $97. And this thing could be so incredible that you want to buy this as well. And if you decide not to buy it, then you go into a down-sell. So then there might be an offer for a $67 thing. And so it goes.

And I will have to confess and to be honest, that I have followed one of these funnels down the track, starting from a $6 book sale, all the way to buying someone who I've been wanting to learn from for a long time, buying that person's entire library of online courses worth thousands and thousands of dollars for just 997, for under $1,000. And I was so happy with myself, so happy, but I wouldn't have gotten to that offer if I hadn't taken that person up on all the other little ones. And to this day, I am happy. That's the best $1,000 I've ever spent because I got probably $30,000 or $40,000 worth of online courses. And I actually take these courses. So when done well, these little suckers can really pull you in.

The third thing, once you know and understand where you're making money with this, the third thing you need to know to succeed at this is you're going to need a healthy budget. So if you're still on a tight budget, if you're still not sure how much money you can actually afford to spend on ads or you're still getting started, you're just up and running, you're in list-building phase, then this is not the right way to go for you. If you've already sold your online courses a few times, you're already making six figures and you're used to investing in ads and you know the value of your conversions, then it might be a good place for you to consider these offers.

If you're still on a tight budget and you're not quite ready to spend thousands of dollars on ads, then these tiny offers are probably not the best place for you to start. Think about it. You need to drive enough people to that $7 sale so that if a small number of them buy your $7 thing, you're still losing money on the front-end, but with the right up-sells, you can make a lot of money on the back-end, but you have to bring massive number of people through there, through that funnel in order to sell enough of your up-sells in the back-end. So you need enough budget at the front-end of this funnel to be able to drive a large number of people through all of the up-sells, because a handful of conversions is just not going to give you the critical mass that you need to make money on the back-end of this.

So if you're thinking about creating one of those offers and you know that you have enough to create up-sells and down-sells, and you can put a healthy ad budget on, please do it. I love seeing these $7 offers in my feed. And I love seeing how collectively as marketers, we have increased the value of the things that we're giving away for $7 compared to when I just started out and there were so many free things and they were not great at all. I feel like we're making the world a better place with more great $7 offers. And now that you've heard this podcast episode, you know how to pull this off with style.

So if you have a successful $7 offer running, and you'd like to be featured on the podcast, send my team an email at hello@shineandsucceed.com and we are going to reach out and be in touch because I want you to get your $7 offer featured as an example here on the podcast so that all of our listeners can learn from you. So reach out, hello@shineandsucceed.com and then let's get you featured on the podcast so we can create some great examples for everyone to follow and unpack some case studies.

Want to learn how to get your first list building ad up without wasting money?

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