Making money from paid advertising

[NotSoAverageJoe]

Lately I've been getting more and more tired of SEO. I've come to realize while I love SEO as a tool, I hate the process behind it. It's boring and most often takes a long time, and if you're unlucky Google can fuck you up.

Maybe I just need a break from SEO but I've started to become very interested in paid advertising and the art of optimizing landing pages, it will probably become just as boring as SEO after a while, but hey, why not give it a shot?

The point of all this:
This journey will focus more on actually learning stuff than making sick gains (which will come with time).

I have two main goals that I want to accomplish:

1. Learn how to find a good product to promote
2. Learn how to improve the conversions of a website
3. Learn how to find a good target audience

The first step in my journey:
The first step is to find a suitable product or service that I can promote. I've already run some tests and realized I might be promoting a service which require too much from a beginner. I want to find a product/service that is easy to use and doesn't require the visitor to have any kind of knowledge before hand.

In my head this should lead to more conversions since the user doesn't have to think twice if they really need/know how to use the service/product. If I promoted some course on how to make cool DIY stuff, which would sound better?

"Create cool DIY stuff with tools in your home"
"Create cool DIY stuff by using these affordable tools"

To me the former sounds better, because more people are probably willing to do something if they don't need to buy extra tools and stuff. I could of course be wrong, hopefully we'll get some experienced advertisers here that can help me out.

Expectations:
I really only have one expectation, that I will learn all of this. Hopefully to the point where I can scale it up by a lot and make me some phat gains.

If everything goes according to my plans, I should be running profitable ads on various networks by the end of the year.

Next update will be when I have found a good product or service. I also appreciate your tips and wisdom!

 

[Deleted member 15724]

To start, I would find a product/service that has demand (Google competitors, trending products, best affiliate offers, etc...) so you can expect revenue asap. I was never fond of SEO, but being on the media buying side can be pretty exciting (and expensive). Master 1 traffic source (Google, Facebook, Native, Mobile, whatever) at a time, stay updated on the best strategies by following industry leaders and blogs, and don't be afraid to make mistakes.

Start with a few affiliate offers, and when you're more comfortable in your media buying skills and understand more about sales funnels, make your own product/service.

BTW, make sure you have a decent budget to play with. There's a learning curve and art to media buying. I recommend at least $3k.

Best of luck on your journey!

 

[X]

The work behind SEO can be boring and tedious, but CRO is always fascinating - figuring out why one headline (color scheme, buy button text, etc.) converts better (by whatever metrics you measure, be it clicks, leads, sales, etc.) & the psychology behind it is intriguing (in my opinion, at least).

I look forward to seeing your updates. Best of luck on your journey!

 

[iMechanic]

I saw your amazon journey, It was good. Best of luck with the new journey. For this journey, any mindset like richest advertiser in Sweden

 

[Shana Walters]

Good luck.

 

[NotSoAverageJoe]

Update 1:

I have now found the right product, it was in front of me all along. The best thing is that I won't be stuck with just one product, but will be able to pitch multitude of other things towards the visitors.

I have just recently finished up the lander, as a first landing page I think it will suffice (the point is to improve it either way). Call to action at the top and the bottom, with some easy to digest information in between. I'm keeping it simple and easy so far. I've been listening to podcasts about conversion optimization and there's just so much to take in.

Also realized that the tools for A/B testing are pretty complex. If anyone has a recommendation for an easy to use A/B tool I'd love to hear it. I've been looking at Optimizely and Google Optimize, and while they both have the drag/drop editor I just find the backend part of it very confusing, settings goals, targets, events, audiences and such. I guess I will just have to read up more on it. I just want to track the which copy/color produce the most clicks on the buttons, maybe there's an easier way to do it?

I will start running Facebook ads towards my lander today and see how well it performs.

 

[laur.laurix]

Are u targeting english speaking countries? Sweeden, Norway, Denmark are an untouched gold mine because of the hard to write and speak languages.

 

[NotSoAverageJoe]

Update 2:
I've been away from the computer for awhile and I also decided to switch things up. The product I was promoting before is still in play, but I don't think it's the best choice for learning paid advertising as the audience is pretty limited, on Facebook at least.

Instead I have opted for a t-shirt store, being a merch seller since the early days I know what sells and what doesn't. I've had great success on both Merch, Amazon Seller Central and Etsy, so going my own way shouldn't be a problem, at least when it comes to designs. Merch is great, but there are also a few cons with it:
-Being at the top means tons of copy cats + fake reports
-It's a numbers game really, you can never tell which design will sell or not so it's all about quantity
-Constantly being at the mercy of Amazon in terms of profit and which designs are up
-Amazon slowly but surely giving pushing away small sellers to give big brands all the fun

It wouldn't surprise me if big brands will take over Merch completely the following years. So that's why I have decided to go my own way.

My solution:
I've built my store with Woocommerce and I'm using Printful for fulfillment. I can price my shirts similarly and make more profit per sale compared to Merch. Reason I haven't updated for so long is because I've been making sure I got everything on my store, pixels, heatmaps, analytics and more. Last week I was finally able to launch my store officially.

My paid ads:
So far I've been running 3 different ads to the same shirt. The shirt itself isn't a big seller on Amazon, but it's good looking and has a good niche.

I tried traffic, conversion and boosting a post. So far the conversion was the best in terms of clicks and engagement, but it didn't give me any sales and ad cost exceeded the profit I would make from a single sale. I make around $10 profit per shirt sold, so I'm thinking that if an ad exceeds $10 I should just ditch it (unless I'm running it for likes, comments and shares). Please correct me if I thinking wrong here!

I've been reading a lot and stumbled upon a guy called Chris Record, he kept his ads simple in the beginning and was talking that to become profitable on an ad the reach needs to be in the thousands. From my limited testing it seems to hold true, the ad that get the most clicks and engagement was also the one with the biggest reach.

The question is, how do I get that kind of reach and not blow my budget? Are there any tricks to this?

Some questions and thoughts:
Can I run an engagement ad and later turn it into a conversion ad? I haven't found a way to do this, it would be dope if I could get heaps of engagement first from cheap countries then run the same ad but with conversions in mind. Let me know!

 

[neo.one]

"Spend money to make money"..

What your budget for running this.

 

[drilonnn]

Update 2:
I've been away from the computer for awhile and I also decided to switch things up. The product I was promoting before is still in play, but I don't think it's the best choice for learning paid advertising as the audience is pretty limited, on Facebook at least.

Instead I have opted for a t-shirt store, being a merch seller since the early days I know what sells and what doesn't. I've had great success on both Merch, Amazon Seller Central and Etsy, so going my own way shouldn't be a problem, at least when it comes to designs. Merch is great, but there are also a few cons with it:
-Being at the top means tons of copy cats + fake reports
-It's a numbers game really, you can never tell which design will sell or not so it's all about quantity
-Constantly being at the mercy of Amazon in terms of profit and which designs are up
-Amazon slowly but surely giving pushing away small sellers to give big brands all the fun

It wouldn't surprise me if big brands will take over Merch completely the following years. So that's why I have decided to go my own way.

My solution:
I've built my store with Woocommerce and I'm using Printful for fulfillment. I can price my shirts similarly and make more profit per sale compared to Merch. Reason I haven't updated for so long is because I've been making sure I got everything on my store, pixels, heatmaps, analytics and more. Last week I was finally able to launch my store officially.

My paid ads:
So far I've been running 3 different ads to the same shirt. The shirt itself isn't a big seller on Amazon, but it's good looking and has a good niche.

I tried traffic, conversion and boosting a post. So far the conversion was the best in terms of clicks and engagement, but it didn't give me any sales and ad cost exceeded the profit I would make from a single sale. I make around $10 profit per shirt sold, so I'm thinking that if an ad exceeds $10 I should just ditch it (unless I'm running it for likes, comments and shares). Please correct me if I thinking wrong here!

I've been reading a lot and stumbled upon a guy called Chris Record, he kept his ads simple in the beginning and was talking that to become profitable on an ad the reach needs to be in the thousands. From my limited testing it seems to hold true, the ad that get the most clicks and engagement was also the one with the biggest reach.

The question is, how do I get that kind of reach and not blow my budget? Are there any tricks to this?

Some questions and thoughts:
Can I run an engagement ad and later turn it into a conversion ad? I haven't found a way to do this, it would be dope if I could get heaps of engagement first from cheap countries then run the same ad but with conversions in mind. Let me know!

Good luck on your journey! As far as i know, you can't do that. Facebook optimizes engagement campaigns for engagement, whatever sale you make from that is actually counted as a lucky sale. Whereas conversion campaigns are optimized for the objective that you have chosen. The pixel optimizes at campaign level. So each new campaign is a new optimization for the FB Pixel. To be honest, engagement doesn't matter. Just start optimizing for conversions.

 

[NotSoAverageJoe]

"Spend money to make money"..

What your budget for running this.

Budget is set to "what it takes to become profitable"

Good luck on your journey! As far as i know, you can't do that. Facebook optimizes engagement campaigns for engagement, whatever sale you make from that is actually counted as a lucky sale. Whereas conversion campaigns are optimized for the objective that you have chosen. The pixel optimizes at campaign level. So each new campaign is a new optimization for the FB Pixel. To be honest, engagement doesn't matter. Just start optimizing for conversions.

Any suggestions on how I can optimize for conversions?

Here's my strategy so far:
-Run 3 engagement ads to see which target group responds best to my post
-Run a traffic to the target group who responded best
-Use FB pixel to retarget the people that visited my site and run a conversion ad

 

[neo.one]

Op, money spend until now..approx maybe

 

[drilonnn]

Budget is set to "what it takes to become profitable"


Any suggestions on how I can optimize for conversions?

Here's my strategy so far:
-Run 3 engagement ads to see which target group responds best to my post
-Run a traffic to the target group who responded best
-Use FB pixel to retarget the people that visited my site and run a conversion ad

Well, create a conversion campaign with view content or add to cart objective, and let it run for a few days, the pixel will optimize the audience. Once you have enough sales/add to carts/ create a lookalike audience and choose purchase objective.

 

[NotSoAverageJoe]

Well, create a conversion campaign with view content or add to cart objective, and let it run for a few days, the pixel will optimize the audience. Once you have enough sales/add to carts/ create a lookalike audience and choose purchase objective.

That will be my next test then!

Update 3:

From all the tutorials I have seen online most people have been telling me to narrow down as much as possible to get cheap engagement. But from my testing yesterday I realized that this is not the case, at least when it comes to engagement ads. I had 3 ad sets running yesterday:

1. Targeting women between 21-65 living in specific cities and liking a particular niche.
This audience was well defined according to Facebook, the needle was in the middle of that audience meter thing. I was getting some engagement, but only likes. For each interaction I paid $0.13.

2. Targeting women between 21-65 living in the US and liking a particular niche + side interest.
This audience was considered "broad" according to Facebook, but funny enough I got more engagement than the previous adset. I was getting likes, shares and comments and they were all cheaper.

3. Targeting men and women between 21-65 living in the US and liking a particular niche.
This one took the price, it was broad but it was getting shares, likes and comments like no other adset. And best of all, it was the cheapest of them all. I paid $0.06 per interaction.

And as expected with engagement ads, I haven't gotten a single sale from it yet. I thought that adding a discount code would make it a little more attractive but nope. I at least know the design is good and funny. I saw a "guru" recommending running an engagement til you get some sales but it seems highly unlikely, I don't know.

I will keep running the best ad for another day, hoping I can get some traffic to my site so I can create a good audience.

 

[NotSoAverageJoe]

Update 4:
Got my first sale through FB ads today, the same customer tried to buy a shirt yesterday but their card was declined, today it went through. However since I was using a different type of shirt which costs more the profit was slim.

Another thing I just realized I don't know which ad generated the sale, since I was running several ads at once. I was running a PPE ad alongside a conversion ad where the goal was viewcontent. If there's a way to track which ad gave me the sale, let me know!

I've been running two more conversion ads as well, with "add to cart" and "start purchase" as goals. Now since the customer bought the shirt today, the "start purchase" ad counted her as a conversion, even though she originally made the purchase the day before. I wonder if this will skew results...

What to do next:
So obviously running ads to a shirt that is barely making me any profit is pretty dumb, on this particular shirt I make about $3 profit and I honestly doubt I will find a way to run FB ads to this shirt where each conversion costs less than that. I would gladly be proven wrong though.

But even if I wasn't profitable it feels good getting that comfirmation that I actually managed to sell something, it is possible in other words.