Welcome to this brand new section where it's time to start talking about paid advertising.
And I'm going to kick off this first lecture with a question, a question that might surprise you.
And that question is, do we have to even do paid advertising?
Well, the answer to that is, in fact, no.
You don't have to do paid advertising with all of the free and low cost techniques that I've showed
you.
You can definitely build out a very profitable business.
And they even showed you a possible projection where you could be making up to $10,000 a month purely
with those techniques.
So if we don't have to do it, why even bother considering it?
Why even have lectures on paid advertising?
Well, the reason for that, of course, is because there are huge advantages.
The first one being that it is an instant source of traffic.
The moment you start paying for ads, you are going to get traffic to your site.
Now you can see here that I've put here in brackets, it doesn't mean it's targeted traffic.
And this is a really key point with paid advertising.
It is, in fact quite easy to drive a massive amount of traffic to your store.
However, it is a lot more difficult to drive the right traffic, a lot more difficult to drive the
ideal customer.
The people that are actually going to buy products from your store and of course it's those people that
you want.
But assuming you are driving targeted traffic, then that leads into the second advantage and that is
that paid advertising really is the only way to scale your business ten X and beyond.
And I don't necessarily mean ten x exactly.
I just mean it really is the only method to take your business up many, many levels.
A process that would be very difficult to do if you relied purely on free and low cost techniques.
So those are the key advantages.
But what about the disadvantages?
Well, the main disadvantage, as you probably won't be surprised to learn, is that the moment you
stop paying, you don't have any traffic.
When you stop paying for ads, those customers will not be coming to your store.
But of course, that's not the case with free traffic.
Once you create that content, it is going to send a targeted visitors to your store pretty much for
eternity.
Now, the other main disadvantage is that it can get very expensive because almost all of these advertising
platforms are in fact auctions.
And what that means is that you are directly competing with your competition to show ads.
And that means that if they are prepared to pay more to show the ads, you will be moved down in terms
of how often or where your ads are shown.
And if you want to beat out the competition, you often find yourself having to pay more and more.
Now, paying more and more isn't a problem.
As long as your paid advertising is profitable, it has to be profitable.
And I know that might sound really obvious, but so many times people seem to think that just because
they're paying somehow they've got a great business.
And it simply isn't the case.
And I'm going to give you two really basic examples here to illustrate how you need to approach this.
So the first example is you spend $10,000 on ads and you get $10,000 in sales.
That is not profitable.
You are not making money with that.
In fact, if you add on all your various other expenses, you are in fact losing money.
However, in example two, you spend the same amount on ads, $10,000, but this time you're making
$30,000 in sales that is profitable.
There is, in fact an expression in business which you might have heard, which is sales are vanity
and profit is sanity.
And that perfectly illustrates my point.
So many people seem to think that because they have good sales, they have a great business.
They'll say something like, Oh yes, my business makes $1 million per year.
And while that might sound impressive, that's the vanity part.
Many times in reality, a business like that can in fact be making hardly any profit or maybe even losing
money.
Why?
Because they're not focusing on profitability, the sanity part.
And so with paid advertising, no matter how much you spend, please ensure that you are always profitable.
Okay.
I think I might have driven that point well and truly home.
The next thing that I want you to really appreciate is that paid advertising is a real skill.
The problem, if you like, these days, is that the Internet makes it very easy for anybody with a
budget to set up a paid advertising account and start running ads.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they know what they're doing.
It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to drive the right traffic to their site.
Why?
Because it's not their area of expertise.
Marketing is a real skill which in many cases can take years to learn how to do it properly.
And in addition to that, even if you were to do it yourself, it would take up a massive amount of
your time.
You cannot simply approach marketing as something you do at the end of the day for ten minutes.
It has to be front and center of your business.
It is incredibly important and therefore it will take up a considerable amount of time.
Now in addition to this, there is another problem, and sorry if I've already suggested this in the
course.
But there are so many people on platforms like YouTube telling you that marketing is really, really
easy and that paid advertising is so simple that if you just give them $2,000 for their course within
one day or two days, you're going to be running ads and making an incredible amount of sales.
I am here to tell you that that is sadly not the case.
Please do not invest in one of these courses unless it's from a really reputable source and you really
have the time to apply the techniques that they will teach.
So with all that said, how should you approach paid advertising?
What is in fact the most intelligent way to use your money to the greatest effect?
Well, in my opinion, that is to outsource your marketing and your paid advertising.
There are tons of people, particularly on Fiverr.com, that have real expertise in these areas which
will run campaigns for you at very affordable costs.
Now, on that subject, of course that's an additional expense you will need to pay them, but once
again, it's all about getting a return on your investment.
If you pay somebody $1,000 a month to run your campaigns for you, and as a result of that, you make
2000 more dollars in sales per month, it's completely worth doing.
It totally makes sense.
And in addition to that, you have all your time free to focus on other parts of your business.
And so by way of quick example, let me just go over to Fiverr.com where you can see I've entered Facebook
advertising, Shopify.
So imagine I wanted to advertise on Facebook, for example, and you can see there are many, many results
that pop up.
This very first one, for example, I will set up Shopify Facebook ads campaign.
ET Cetera, five stars, 397 reviews.
So if I click on this, this person has an excellent reputation.
And then over here you see the prices so you can get going for basically $100.
Then if it works out for you, you can upgrade to the standard version more or less $200 and then finally
to premium at $300.
And as I say, as long as they are making at least that for you in profit, then it is totally worth
it.
In addition to Fiverr, you also have sites like Freelancer and Upwork, which can also be great sources
of expertise.
Now it's also likely at this point that you're going to come across digital marketing agencies where
basically they're offering similar services, but in most cases for a much more inflated price.
And I'm not suggesting that they are bad in any way.
Many of them are excellent, but you will probably have to commit more money up front to get started,
which is why I believe that starting with gigs like this on Fiverr really is the perfect way to get
going.
And talking of getting going, when should you in fact start paid advertising?
Well, here there are really two key points.
First of all, you should have profit from your free and low cost techniques.
In other words, your business is making money and you can reinvest that money into paid techniques.
And the second point, which you probably won't be surprised to hear, is please do not start this until
you truly understand your ideal customer, because if you do not understand your ideal customer, if
you do not understand who you are targeting, whether you are going to do the marketing yourself or
you're going to pay somebody to do it, it is highly unlikely that you will be profitable.
But if you have spent the time understanding who your ideal customer is, that knowledge in combination
with the right expertise can absolutely take your business to the moon.