Let’s talk about the mindset you need to adopt regarding paid advertising to promote your network marketing business, affiliate marketing or any other business.
Paid Advertising is the life blood of your business. Understanding how to use paid advertising is a necessary skill to build a successful home based business.
However before I began this article on paid advertising, here’s…..
A little background about me: I have been in the corporate world for many, many years. I have travelled all over the world. Stayed at some of the finest hotels. I became very well known in my field of expertise. My wife also worked in the corporate world, having helped start new business and an expert in arts and crafts.
Soon we were raising two girls and the money was not going as far as it once was. I made a decision that I wanted to start a part-time home based business and choose network marketing or mlm as my home business.
Not to bore you, it didn’t work as I thought it would. I jumped from one MLM Company to another with no success. I finally gave up.
Another 4 years went by and still wanting out of the corporate trap, I bought a franchise. That lasted about 2 years and back to corporate life.
Finally after a lot of “soul” searching, I opened a Brick and Mortar business. I was now the Owner, CEO, President and Chief money maker in my own healthcare practice.
Excited to be my own boss and have my own business, my wife and I put all of our efforts into building a successful practice.
The business thrived and we became well known as one of the best healthcare practices in the area. In fact I became President of our healthcare association and sought after expert in our field.
At about 12 years, I started to look at our success. I can remember it was a Sunday afternoon and I was making plans for the week.
While we had a successful business, I soon realized we didn’t have a life. We hadn’t taken a vacation in the 12 years. No time off except for Christmas and New Years. I was working 50+ hours instead of the 40 hours in my corporate life.
Success was fully dependent upon me…I was the marketing expert, account, janitor, inventory, banker, advertising and everything else. My wife was the office manager, greeter, money manager and insurance taker.
While a few of our friends were taking trips, we were working. Something had to change.
I again looked at network marketing as a part-time effort to possibly replace our healthcare practice.
With the stress and the time our practice required, we could not put in much time to build our network marketing and once again, I quit.
Another 5 years went by and again, our life was rapped around our practice.
About this time I met Ferny and Tim. Both were smiling from ear to ear, working less than half of my time, traveling and earning a good income.
Bottom line, they convinced me that I was making a good decision by looking at a home business.
Success was still a long way off, but with their help, and Elite Marketing Pro I stayed with it.
Ferny suggested I work my business on Facebook and create a Blog.
Well, less than 2 years later we sold our healthcare practice after 19+ years and started a new career.
Today I have over 900 Blog Post and by placing Facebook Ads the dollars began to come in.
But it wasn’t always like that.
Before working with Elite Marketing Pro (EMP), I was still struggling.
I was advertising as an affiliate and was just beginning to advertise on Facebook with very little success.
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 ready to quit again. I became really scared to invest in my business.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.
What do small businesses do when they want more customers?
They advertise!
Brick and mortar businesses like my practice, before Facebook and online advertising were invented, we advertised with traditional methods like newspapers, radio, magazines, flyers and direct mail.
That’s how I got people to look at my practice, my products 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 promote your network marketing business online.
In fact, if you have a small home based 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 I hear of people complaining about their results on Facebook.
For example, they spent $20 on an ad, and they might get 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.
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!
I was running multiple ads and many dollars just to get people to come to our practice. You could call these leads, not sales.
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 with paid traffic (advertising) has always lost money up front.
It’s rare, for anyone, after running hundreds of dollars of traffic (advertising) for their business to become profitable right off the bat with an ad.
So you might be saying…
“You ran a successful business with advertising and your still not an expert?”
I’m not and 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.
Marketing changes. Advertising changes. I’m not an expert, but I am an ADVERTISER!
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.
Does every ad work for me? NO. But I learn from every ad.
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.
Eventually you can get there, and at the end of the day, once you consider things like up-sells 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 with your first few ads.
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, here’s a blog post on the metrics that you need to pay attention to for paid traffic:
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.
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.
You also need to remember that you’re advertising to cold traffic.
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 to promote your network marketing business, 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. STOP SELLING!
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.
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, 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 capture actual screen shot of the ad and paste it in my “traffic journal.”
Then, 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 a spreadsheet. Use want ever your comfortable with even a hand-written journal, I don’t care.
Just keep track of your ads!
Tim Erway, (more on this below) 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
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 how you promote your network marketing business through paid traffic?
Let’s say you run five campaigns, and you spend $100 each or $500 dollars
Three of them fail, and two of them succeed.
The three that failed cost $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 and it hurt but I learned. I didn’t bother to take my advertising 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).
Here is an over-the-shoulder tour of…
The highest-converting audiences, ads, landing pages, and offers
Elite Marketing Pro, has put together a point-for-point tutorial revealing the exact advertising process in a 100% FREE traffic workshop…
This traffic workshop is hosted by none other than Tim Erway, CEO and expert marketer at Elite Marketing Pro.
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…
See how Tim used this formula to turn a $10 test campaign into $141,246.30 in sales.
Those are 100% real numbers, and Tim will show exactly how he did it.
So if you haven’t registered yet, I invite you to click on the Banner Below or this link…
Pick a time that works for you to attend Tim’s traffic workshop right here.
I would like to thank Matt Baran for his valuable tips and contribution to this blog post…Thanks Matt.
Until next time,
