The Right Mindset for Paid Advertising
Let’s talk about the mindset you need to adopt regarding paid advertising for your business.
So, in case you don’t know me, I work with EMP and run the majority of our paid traffic.
We spend lots of money on campaigns, and I’ve had the good fortune of being able to see data from those campaigns scale at a very high rate to get more leads and customers.
But it wasn’t always like that.
Before working with EMP, close to four years ago now, I was just starting out myself.
I was advertising Elite Marketing Pro offers as an affiliate and was just starting out advertising on Facebook.
So I ran a few campaigns, spent some money, maybe $50, and didn’t get ANY significant results right away.
Sure, I got a few leads here and there, and maybe one sale, but it definitely was not profitable.
Because of that…
I became very emotional about the money I “lost”
I told myself, “This didn’t work,” and as a result, I became really scared to invest in my business for awhile.
Essentially, I had a toxic mindset about paid traffic.
If the term “traffic” is putting you off, let’s use another term that you’re familiar with: advertising.
Essentially, getting traffic is advertising.
Now, if you’re reading this, you’ve likely got a small business of some sort.
And what do small businesses do when they want more customers?
They advertise!
1. THINK LIKE A BUSINESS OWNER
Small brick and mortar businesses, before Facebook and online advertising were invented, advertised with traditional methods like newspapers, radio, magazines, and billboards.
That’s how they got people to look at their goods and services.
Those methods all cost a lot of money, and they are probably all out of the realm of possibility for the small solopreneur, network marketer, and Internet marketer out there…and that’s just fine!
Lucky for you, you’re building a business in an age where it’s still very affordable to advertise online.
In fact, if you have a small business, reaching out to your potential customers and getting leads has never been cheaper than it is now.
And most small businesses—both online and brick and mortar—still haven’t even figured out the power of advertising on Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest.
With that said, what’s the issue for you—the solopreneur, the network marketer, the Internet marketer, as you start to run ads?
It’s this…
Understanding the mindset of advertising
Every day in online Facebook groups, I see people complaining about their results on Facebook.
For example, they spent $20 on an ad, and they might have gotten two leads, and no sales.
They complain that advertising on Facebook doesn’t work, and it’s all a scam.
Well, here’s the truth bomb…
You need to have the mindset of an actual small business owner.
2.REALIZE THIS IS NOT A LOTTERY
First of all, you need to understand that advertising isn’t a lottery.
You don’t place one ad and magically start getting commission notifications!
Yes, the overall idea is to eventually produce that “magic slot machine,” where you can put in $1 of advertising and get $2 back.
But you need to understand it takes time and work to get there!
I’ll go so far as to declare this:
Anyone that has ever built a successful business off of paid traffic has always lost money up front.
It’s rare, even for somebody like me, after running thousands upon thousands of dollars of traffic for Elite Marketing Pro—it’s rare that I’m ever profitable right off the bat with an ad.
I can hear what you’re saying…
“What?! Aren’t you the successful traffic guy?”
Yup. Sure am.
Let me explain…
Yes, it is absolutely possible to hit it out of the park right away, but it’s extremely rare when that happens.
3.KNOW PAID ADS ARE AN INVESTMENT
A true entrepreneur and business owner will understand that paid traffic is an investment in your business.
You need to spend money up front and collect data to find out what has worked and what hasn’t worked.
If you go in thinking that you’re going to spend $50 and make $1,000 right away, I’m here to tell you that it’s probably not going to happen.
That’s the lottery mindset.
Again, eventually you can get there, and at the end of the day, once you consider things like upsells and other offers in the lifetime value of a customer, yes, something like that can absolutely happen.
But don’t expect it right off the bat.
4.MUY DATA TO FIGURE OUT WHAT WORKS
You need to go in with the mindset that you’re spending that $50 to essentially buy data, to figure out what does and doesn’t work, to optimize more of what is working, to get better results.
If you’re lost and frustrated, and you don’t know where to go, you need to start by focusing on the basics.
And in fact, I wrote a post blog on the metrics that you need to pay attention to for paid traffic:
7 Facebook Ad Metrics You Should Be Tracking
In the post, I explain the hierarchy of your traffic campaign, where you start out with the end goal of a sale, but in order to get a sale you’ve got to get a lead first.
You’ve got to give somebody the option that says, “I’m interested in what you have to sell.”
In order to get a lead, you have to get eyeballs on your offer, which is essentially a click from somebody seeing your ad and clicking through to your sales page to become your lead.
So if you’re not getting sales, it’s probably because your lead flow is too low.
It’s also likely because your leads are too expensive.
5.FOCUS ON YOUR COST PER CLIK
To fix that, go back to the most basic metric: clicks.
The cheaper cost per click, the more eyeballs you’ll get on your sales page (or whatever it is that it takes for them to become a lead) because your advertising budget goes farther.
That means you’re going to get more leads.
Eventually, the more leads you get, the more chances you’re going to have for somebody to buy your offer.
But none of that’s going to matter until you get more clicks, so just focus on getting your cost per click down as cheap as possible.
6.GIVE COLD TRAFFICK TIME TO WARM UP
You also need to remember that you’re advertising to cold traffic, too.
Unless you’ve been doing this for awhile and you’re retargeting, the majority of the eyeballs that are seeing your offer are seeing it for the very first time.
People used to say it takes an average of five to seven times for people to see your offer before they buy, but Russell Brunson mentioned recently that it’s now more like twelve times that somebody needs to be exposed to your offer before they buy.
As you start advertising, you’re dealing with cold traffic that doesn’t know who you are just yet.
You can’t expect they’re going to jump into your offer just right away and just buy, buy, buy.
You have to work on them a little bit.
It takes time to build a relationship with that customer.
Get them to be a lead.
Get them more interested and let those leads work through the follow-up system.
Get them more familiar with your offer and you’ll start to see them convert along the way.
7.TRACK YOUR ADS IN A TRAFFICK JOURNAL
If you spend $50 on advertising, but you’re not keeping track of your data, what did you get from it?
Not much.
You basically just threw 50 bucks out the window.
So keep track of all your data by tracking your ads.
For every campaign that I run for Elite Marketing Pro, I record:
Reach
Clicks
Leads
Sales
Relevance score
Click-through rate
Cost per click
Cost per lead
Cost per sale
Total profit and loss for the ad
These are the basic metrics of your advertising.
I pull the actual screen shot of the ad up and I paste it in my traffic journal.
Then, on top of that, once it’s done running or once I have enough data, I write down my thoughts about why I thought the ad worked or bombed.
Finally, I come up with a plan of action of what I’m going to do with that ad and what I could do differently.
I keep my advertising journal in Evernote, but you can use whatever works for you—Google Docs, spreadsheets, a hand-written journal, I don’t care.
Just keep track of your ads!
8.REVIEW AND TWEAK YOUR ADS
Tim Erway, one of my long-time mentors, taught me what to do when you get stuck with a traffic campaign:
Look at the data that you’ve already got and see what can you do differently to improve it.
Maybe switch audiences
Maybe put in some new copy
Try a new image
Try a lookalike audience
Or if it’s not working, maybe it’s time to just scrap that ad all together
9.PLAY OFFENSE, NOT DEFENSE !
Finally, one thing that’s really important when adopting a successful mindset for paid advertising is something I’m paraphrasing from Gary Vaynerchuk:
Don’t focus on playing defense; play offense and focus on scoring as many points as possible.
How does that apply to paid traffic?
Let’s say you run five campaigns, and you spend $100 each.
Three of them fail, and two of them succeed.
The three that failed lost $300.
The two that succeeded made $200.
You’re $100 in the hole from where you started.
The majority of people that are new to running traffic are going to look at that and say…
“Man, I lost $100! This doesn’t work. I failed. The sky is falling!”
On the other hand, I take a look at that, and I get really freaking excited because now I’ve got two profitable campaigns that I start to scale now that I know something’s working.
I can’t overstate this point…
You’re buying data to figure out what works and what doesn’t!
I may be $100 down at first, but I know the deeper I dig, the more profitable I’m going to get with those two good campaigns, because I know that they have a lot of potential.
But that wouldn’t happen if I looked at those initial results and decided, “Man, I lost $100. This just doesn’t work at all.”
When you look at your ads as buying data, it removes the emotional attachment so that you can think about them correctly.
So set an advertising budget that you can afford with money that you don’t mind parting with, knowing that what you’re paying for is data that’s going to help you optimize.
It’s your “tuition” to learn this skill
At some point, that tuition money’s going to have a return, and it could be sooner rather than later.
So focus on the positive things that happen when campaigns work, and score as many of those points as you possibly can.
Those simple base hits might not hit it out of the park, but just keep getting as many as you can.
If you focus on those, you’re eventually going to score more points than you are going to have points scored against you, and you’ll be coming out ahead on your ads.
What if you have no budget to start?
If you’re planning on spending money that you don’t have—in other words, if you expect a return so you can afford eat—then you should hold off on buying traffic and do some social media recruiting instead.
You definitely don’t want to ‘gamble’ with money you can’t afford to lose.
When I first started, I lost a bunch of money because I didn’t bother to take it seriously.
I didn’t study the advertising platform, and I was just kind of playing the lottery.
After I took it seriously, got the education, and started making a return from the ads, I didn’t mind parting with that money!
Make sense?
Ready to get started?
As you’ve learned, it can take a fair bit of trial and error to analyze your data, optimize your ads, and create a winning campaign.
However, I do know a shortcut…
Which has helped dozens of marketers quickly create profitable campaigns (often within just a few days).
And that’s taking us up on an over-the-shoulder tour of…
Our most highest-converting audiences, ads, landing pages, and offers
Here at Elite Marketing Pro, we’ve put together a point-for-point tutorial revealing our exact advertising process in a 100% FREE traffic workshop…
Which is hosted by none other than Tim Erway, our fearless leader and CEO.
Simply pick a time and register right here.
You’ll discover how you can put together a profitable ad campaign in just 10 minutes a day with as little as $10 in initial ad spend.
In fact…
We’ve used the exact formula to turn a $10 test campaign into $141,246.30 in sales.
Those are 100% real numbers, and Tim will show exactly how we did it.
So if you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for?
Until next time,
Matt Baran Traffic Specialist Elite Marketing Pro
