It’s one thing to spend a company’s money or a client’s money on ads, it’s another to spend your own money. In this article, I talk about my own money. Money that I earned, worked hard for and spent myself. I didn’t spend all this money overnight and it wasn’t handed to me to spend. I literally spent the last dime I had to keep going and advertise my business. 

I’ve never been lucky in life. Everything I have, I had to work my ass off for. Running online ads is no exception. I made so many mistakes that cost me money, I can’t even count them all. After all though, that’s how most of us learn, by correcting mistakes we made in our past. My goal in writing this for you, is to help you gain insight on what to do and what not to do, based on my personal experience. 

I ran my very first Facebook ad in July of 2010. I ran it for a local mortgage company and failed miserably. I spent $200 and never got a single lead. At the time, I was getting a ton of leads organically from Facebook and since the ads didn’t work, I just went back to doing what I was doing and getting leads from people on my friends list and in groups I belonged to. 

Flash forward 4 years to 2014, I’d find myself broke AF because I spent my last dime to make an event in Las Vegas. I’ve always been a risk taker and I was betting that I could make sales at the event to pay for my trip and my ticket home. At that event I met a dude who showed me how to run Facebook ads for my coaching business. He showed me the easiest way to run an ad you could think of and it worked. Within 2 hours I had 30 leads and had made about $10,000 in sales by the end of the day. I was once again rolling in the dough. I used that exact method to run ads for the next 2 years and crushed it. 

Any time I’d need money, I’d just turn on Facebook ads and collect it. It was really like turning on a faucet that made money come pouring in. I didn’t have to re-invent the wheel. I just kept running the same style ad over and over again. None of my competitors were doing it and I was raking in the dough.

Then in 2016, many of my competitors caught on to what I was doing. This caused the price of my ads to go up and it also caused my reach to die down. I used to could spend $100/day and get 20+ leads. Then, once others caught on, I started spending $100/day to get 2-3 leads. I’d spend more money daily, but the results weren’t really there to justify it. That was when I really had to start digging in and making the most of my ads. The low hanging fruit was gone and I had to learn how to be better than those running ads competing with me. 

The first thing I had to do was work on my offer. If all of us were running ads to the same audience, I had to have the best offer. I worked every day on making my offers better and more specific to the audience I was putting them in front of. I also had to find more niched down audiences to run ads to. While my competition was going broad, I’d go deep. This meant instead of saying “do you work in sales?” I’d ask “Do you close mortgages?” and “Are you a realtor?” and I’d run multiple niched down ads instead of one large ad to the entire community. 

That worked for quite a while and made me a lot of money, but after a while, always starting over and finding new audiences got exhausting. After all, I’d have to make the funnel, run the ad, sell the prospect and deliver the service. I was a one man ass kicking machine, but I was also fucking exhausted.  I knew how to run an ad but I struggled to scale it. After all, since I was finding niched out audiences, I’d run out of prospects quickly. 

At any given time up to 7% of any audience can buy from you right then and there. That means that 93% of the people you advertise to aren’t ready to commit to anything yet. Finding that 7% is no joke and truth is you will waste a lot of time on the 93%. However, if you do it right, the 93% eventually turns into the 7%. You can’t think that one ad and one sales call is going to get you the business. You gotta be in it for the long haul. I’d run ads, retargeting ads, email blasts, text blasts and sly dials. 

In the beginning, I was focused only on the 7% and I wanted to make ALL my money up front. This was because I needed the money. I needed to close the sales up front. I needed my damn ad money back so I could run more ads. It was like trying to feed an addiction. After running this cycle for years, I realized I needed a bigger plan. That’s when I formulated my current way of running ads. 

There are 3 types of prospects in your pipeline. Those ready to buy right now, those that are going to buy soon and those that are going to by someday. When you focus on building a pipeline you close who you can right now and soon, but the someday money will eventually turn into soon and now money if you continue to follow up. 

At one point I was spending $50,000 a month on Facebook ads. I did this for about 6 months. From that $300k I created one hell of a email and phone number database. I bought software that allowed me to follow up with my database and make sales on auto-pilot. Since I had over 100,000 emails and numbers of people who knew me, I needed to work on converting them from the 93% into the 7%. At this point I was able to drop my ad spend down to around $5k a month and just focus on retargeting. So while my competition is all over the place, I spend my time converting fans to clients. 

I still run ads every day, now I’m focused on retargeting everywhere. Once you find me online, I’m in your Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google, and on most of your favorite websites. This strategy allows me to focus on converting the 93% and has led to me going from $100k in sales per month to $100k every 3-4 days. 

One thing that I wished I had in the beginning is a fast way to get offers in front of audiences. I used to spend hours setting up a funnel. Speed matters and most of the components to advertising take time. Recently I dropped PhoneSites on the market and PhoneSites allows you to create a funnel in about 5 mins. This makes it easy to get offers in front of audiences faster, therefore you can run more tests and get more results. Check out PhoneSites at www.phonesites.com it will save you a ton of time.