Hello, and welcome to episode number 62 of the Shine Show, and today I'm going to answer the question what is really, really stopping you from making money with Facebook ads today. Stay tuned. Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, Grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads, so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is the Shine Show.

Hello and welcome. I am so glad you're here. I hope this episode finds you really, really well today wherever you are in the world. I was on a phone call the other day. I'm taking a lot more phone calls and Zoom calls. Well, by phone call, I mean Zoom call. I don't mean an actual phone call. I mean, who really answers the phone when it rings anymore? I was on a Zoom call with someone the other day. I'm taking a lot more Zoom calls now because thanks to COVID-19, I have nowhere to go. I'm sure you're experiencing the same thing, so I have more time to hang out with people on Zoom. I was chatting with someone the other day, and she was telling me that she's looking for a new ads manager.

She'd posted in a group asking for recommendations, and my name came up, which I'm really grateful for. Thank you if you're one of those people who promoted me, but I was talking to her and the conversation we had was not a unique conversation by any means, and here's what she said to me. She said she has a lucrative one-on-one business that brings in multi-six figures a year which is awesome. She told me that she had taken just about every online course known to man, which I get because I think I've taken all of the courses known to man and a few unknown ones as well. She says she's done all the Facebook ads training that came with the courses.

She hasn't invested in Facebook ads training as yet because it's a grudge purchase to her. She was very gracious in admitting to me that she feels like Facebook ads training is a bit like paying to have your tires put on your car, or to have your oil changed in your car. It's something you do when you don't have any other options, but it's not something she was looking forward to, or ever really excited about getting into because she was excited about hiring an ads manager to run her ads for her. She created a lead magnet, and she created a couple of upsells from the lead magnet. For some of you will have seen, there's a bit of a train going on right now to create these tiny offers as they are called or mini offers or upsells, or I don't know.

Call it what you want, but it's like I sell something for $27, then offer an upsell for $49 and then offer an upsell for $97, and make money right off the bat, which is awesome. It works and it is a great idea to do that, but still you got to do it right. She hired an ads manager to help her run ads to this, but she's said, "Tell me, why can't I figure out what is the thing that is between where I am right now and making money? Why are my ads not bringing in more money?" This was her frustration and it was her question to me as we started the conversation. I'll tell you exactly what I shared with her as my advice for her to get out of this conundrum a little bit later in the episode, but before I do, we need to go back to January 2018.

This is my history lesson that I keep going back to. On last week's episode, I told you about Zuckerberg's announcement that shifted the way that we use social media back in January 2018. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, at the end of this episode, you can go back to last week's episode, episode number 61, and you can listen to what I share about how Zuckerberg moved the earth, shaked our worlds for us in January 21. The implication of the algorithm change in January 2018 was huge for online marketers who were just starting out. It's easier for us to start running ads on lower budgets now than it has ever been before and if you start early, you will reap the rewards and the benefits of that the day you are ready to start selling your online course.

The reason for that is that we can start on low budgets with engagement ads and build up our audience lot faster now than we were able to when we had to rely on the organic algorithm, which left us feeling a bit like we're bowing down to the gods of social media for some elusive likes and followers who never really turned into some real buyers. Engagement is the fuel that the algorithm runs on, and we can create that with ad. We artificially, not really artificially because it's not artificial in our bank accounts. We create that engagement by giving Facebook money and telling Facebook to go and find us the engagement we need.

If you add that to a powerful lead magnet that instantly solves a problem for your ideal customer and you run a conversion or list building ad, you have a recipe for creating a mega engaged audience who should be ready to buy from you the moment you announce that your cart is open. Why does that not happen for you? Here's three reasons why. Number one is you're taking advice from Facebook ads experts who started their business before 2018, and I'm going to add here, or you're taking advice from Facebook ads managers who has never run ads for themselves and therefore, both of these people have never had to face the challenges you're facing, and they do not know how to help you overcome your audience building and marketing problems.

When I went to UNI and for my American friends, that's college, I was there between 1999 and 2004 if that is a dead giveaway of my age. I did a bachelor's degree in organizational psychology and in communication science, and then I went on to do a post grad degree majoring in marketing and mass media. Back in the day, we used to call it mass media, and I can honestly say and sincerely say that there is not one thing in my studies that I did for five years that I can use today in my work as an online marketing. We learned the five Ps.

The five Ps were product, price, promotion, place, and people, and anyone who had earned their stripes in marketing knew the five Ps of by heart and could run through the five Ps with any client or any marketing department very quickly, and very quickly be able to identify why this product is not flying off the shelves. That doesn't really cut it anymore. The five Ps are history, and what I learned about above the line and below the line marketing may serve me a little bit today to understand brand building, but I'm definitely not taking out magazine ads anytime soon.

In 2004, in 2005, I worked as an account manager in an advertising agency and back then when we were talking about branding, what we meant was a logo, a font, and an icon, much different to what we mean today when we're talking about building your personal brand on social media and connecting, creating deep connections with your ideal customer. Here's the thing. Whilst all that probably gave me a really good foundation to start from, it's very far away from what the reality is of starting a business with just a laptop, your phone, and a Kajabi account.

In the same way, learning how to run Facebook ads from someone who was on the ground, doing it regularly in 2017 will probably not serve you well, or talking to someone who does it for people who already have a hundred thousand followers or an email list of a hundred thousand people is not serving you very well. What I see when I talk to people who took these courses are that they feel frustrated because they know which levers to pull inside the ads manager, but they have no idea how to make those ads work for them to deliver actual money back into their accounts, and knowing which levers to pull only leaves them feeling like they're just throwing spaghetti on the wall, and pouring their money down a broken vending machine.

That seems like it delivers for everyone else, but not for them. If that's you and you have felt this way, know that you are not alone, and that is not your fault that you haven't been able to connect the dots between ads and actually making money with ads. That's the first thing that's keeping you from making money. It's taking advice from Facebook ads experts who started their business before 2008, or who's not running ads for their own business and therefore, have not had the same challenges as you have. The second reason you're not making money from your ads is because no one has helped you understand the clear difference between traffic and conversion.

A while ago, a friend told me about the ads that she was running for her evergreen webinar, and she expressed her concern that the ads weren't making any money. We looked into it together, and we started to look for some answers, so that we can figure out why these ads weren't making money. The ads had an overall conversion rate of $250, which is a good result for an evergreen webinar in her niche. She asked me if we can see if the audiences was the problem, which could be a totally valid observation or a totally valid question to ask. I looked into it, and I noticed that there were multiple campaigns running to several different cold interest audiences, and she had multiple lookalike audiences based off of past sales and past leads.

Theoretically, it would be hard to say that all of those campaigns were targeting the wrong people. It's hard to get all the campaigns wrong on a $300 a day budget. The audiences was not the problem, but one thing we are really good at here in the Shine Agency is collecting data. We are slightly geeky when it comes to data. Data tells a story, and it tells the story of how people behaved in the promotion. We looked at the data and we tried to see if we can see where this funnel broke down, and why she didn't make money from the ads. What we found didn't really surprise me. Enough people were clicking on the ad. The landing page was converting well.

People were actually showing up for the webinar, and people were staying until the end of the webinar, but they were not buying on the webinar or on the followup email sequence. My friend wasn't seeing that because no one ever helped her understand the relationship between traffic and conversion, she thought that if she built it and she sends enough people to it, that they would buy, but her webinar wasn't converting people to sales, and neither was her follow email up sequence. I watched her webinar and helped her make some changes from teaching too much content to really facilitating a journey for her listeners to help them see her program is the best way for them to really dive deep and work with her to get the results that they need.

She hired a copywriter to tweak the sales page and emails, and voila, her webinar converted. She started making actual real money from the money she was putting into her ads. My friend thought that hiring a Facebook ads manager was the solution to why she wasn't making money without understanding that ads are just the traffic. While it is important to bring the right traffic and to bring enough traffic, all the traffic in the world won't help you if your offers are not converting. I had to help her see that, and I've had to help many people see that marketing and Facebook ads are like PB and J. That's peanut butter and jelly, or peanut butter and jam. They go together, and you need both to succeed.

If you've been pouring money into ads that haven't worked for you in terms of delivering a profit at the end, then I want to invite you to take a look at your funnels, take a look at your marketing. Look at this story that the data is telling you and ask yourself if you have a traffic problem, or if you have a conversion problem. Now you know the second reason why you may not yet be making money from your Facebook ads. It is because no one has helped you understand the difference between traffic and conversion. The third reason you haven't yet made money from your ads is because you don't have someone who holds your hand as you implement your ad strategy.

Have you ever asked someone a Facebook ads question and their answer was it depends? It must be the most infuriating response anyone can give you when you've worked so hard at figuring the takeout. You finally connected it all inside the ads manager, you've spent your hard earned money, and you just don't know if it worked or not, and you have no idea what to do next. Should I run it again? Should I increase the budget? Should you change the image or try another image? Should you put the video into a new campaign? Will it mess up the algorithm if you stop the ads? What about the social proof, how do you keep that and tastes something new? It depends, it depends, it depends. That is the answer to all of those questions.

If at all depends, then what does it depend on and why can't you know what it depends on even if you've taken so many freaking Facebook ads courses before? Because no one is teaching you both PB and J. Most Facebook ads courses just teach PB and most online courses you buy teaches one specific signature one size fits all funnel, and no one connects the dots. Facebook ads get taught in a vacuum. Other courses teaches you one replicable system that if you veer from that, you're left in the cold water. Let me demystify the it depends for you. It depends on what your overall goal is. We can easily get sidetracked by all the numbers in the ads manager, but if you're getting the outcome you want, then all the rest doesn't matter.

If you're not getting the result you want, then you need to make the changes and to know which changes you need, and you need someone with an experienced eye to look at your data and tell you exactly where the problem is. It depends on your budget. A $10 a day problem will be solved in a different way to $100 a day problem, and that will be solved in a different way to $1000 a day problem. It depends on your budget and which ads you're going to run next and how to scale it. You need someone with experience to help you know what the best next step is for you within the budget you have right now, so that you can grow strategically without throwing money in the water.

It depends on how big your audiences are and what you want them to do. Targeting an audience of millions with a video they should watch is totally different than re-targeting a group of a hundred people to get them to buy your online course. It depends on the size of the audience and what you want them to do, but you require someone who understands the relationship between warm audiences and cold audiences and the different optimization tools that Facebook give us to really help us understand what the next best step is. Coming back to the girl I was talking to who was feeling so frustrated that she couldn't see how she was going to get from where she is now to making money with her ads.

I explained to her that she took in the past didn't show her how the algorithm has changed and how that impacted her engagement on social media, and how that meant that because she didn't have any followers and no engagement that she was paying far too much for her ads. I explained to her right now, she's paying someone to send traffic to a funnel without measuring the conversion rights of each of the points in that funnel, so that she can understand the story that the data is telling her, and make the changes she needs to make to the funnel to start showing a profitable return sooner.

I explained to her that not having someone hold their hand and work through this step by step as she moves from a smaller audience and smaller budgets to a larger one with mega budgets, and then scale it for success, she's going to continue to feel frustrated and struggled to figure out what everyone else seems to be making money, but she's not. I explained to her that what she really needs is to understand the connection between marketing and Facebook ads, and that she needs help launching to the right audience and then growing that audience as she sells her knowledge to them, and finally scaling it to the income levels she's dreaming of that will finally allow her to scale back on her one-on-one clients, and get the freedom she so desperately wants and why she started her business in the first place.

Now you know the three reasons why your ads aren't making money yet, and you also know three ways to fix it. I want you to think about yourself 12 months from now. COVID-19 may be starting to die down a little bit, and life may be starting to return to some form of normal. Where do you want to be then? Still struggling for the next one-on-one client, still working your day job, still not connecting the dots between ads and your webinar and your email list that should be making you money on evergreen already? What if you could close the gap faster? What if you could shorten the runway to success? What if you had all the support and the training you need to create ads that puts you in front of more people who actually want what you sell today?

What if you don't have to take on any more one-on-one clients because your online course or membership has replaced that income, and you're able to scale that well beyond seven figures? If this is you and you are ready to start building your lucrative audience of people who are ready to buy from you, and you don't just want the training, but you also want the support and the handholding that is needed to speed up the process to get from here to a profitable launch, then I want to invite you to sign up for our brand new masterclass, where you'll learn how to run ads to build your audience of people who are ready to buy from you today. You can go to shineandsucceed.com/reachmorepeople, sign up for the class.

It's happening this week. You have to hurry because it's only going to be available for a few days, and that is all I have for you today. I hope to see you on the class, and I hope that wherever you are right now, this finds you really well. Stay safe my friends and I'll talk to you again next week, bye. 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.