How *not* to spend money to grow your business... and what spending is wise.

There are services out there that tell you they will grow your Twitter followers or to get you more Facebook fans. And you know, if you just pay $10 or $50, $100, even 500, $1,000. And I will tell you that most of those services are not a good idea. In fact, there are lots of things that you probably should not spend money on in your business and there are the things that you probably would be a good idea to spend money on. And in this video, I'm going to talk about what I wouldn't recommend spending money on, what I would recommend. So the first recommendation is do not run away from those services that say they will increase your followers on Twitter or on Facebook, etc. Etc. And the reason is because what they do is they use a lot of what's called bot farms, these large numbers of fake accounts. And not some of them aren't even fake accounts. Some of them are just people who are paid a very low wage, click like or to click follow on lots and lots of accounts. And so what happens is these are what's called non ideal audience members. And the problem is, yes, you can easily get thousands of Twitter followers or thousands of fans, and it might look like you have an audience, but what happens is when you post things on that social media profile, because those are all fake fans, nobody's going to engage with your content, nobody's going to like it. And as a result, for example, let's just use Facebook. You got 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 Facebook fans from these services. You post something, nobody likes it, nobody engages with it. And so Facebook then says, oh, this person's content must not be interesting because none of their fans are liking it. So we're not even going to show it anymore on Facebook. And so they punish your future content even as a result. But what, and another problem it causes down the road is that when you grow your business a little bit more, you're going to want to spend some money on Facebook advertising. I highly recommend spending some money. Right now I spend between 50 to $100 a month on Facebook ads. But if you're a beginner business, you probably would be a good idea to spend, you know, even in the first year of your business, probably spend, you know, 20 to $30, 20 to $50 a month on Facebook ads would be, it would be plausible and probably a good idea depending on what you're trying to promote. And so when you buy Facebook ads, the most effective spend of that is for your own fans, the people who actually like your content. But how do you know who likes your content if you've bought a bunch of fake fans? And so it's much better if you grow your fan base organically. And that way when you spend money on ads, it's a very money well spent versus let's say you had 5,000 fake fans. It's going to take probably 50 to who knows, maybe over $100 to reach those 5,000 fans. And yet none of them care about your content. They were there to, they were there liking it in order to fulfill their job duty or they were just a robot account. Okay? So do not spend money on buying followers and fans or services that purport to tell you that. Another dangerous service to spend money on is SEO search engine optimization. Lots of services say we're going to get you to the first page of Google. When they say things like that, they're really, really vague. First page of Google for what? Search result or someone searching something, you know they're going to get you to the first page using a list of keywords that nobody really searches. Almost nobody searches it. It's not hard to become number one on Google. But if it's for keywords that you actually, your ideal audience actually cares about, then that is much, much more challenging and that takes a long term effort. And so SEO, a lot of SEO services, search engine optimization services, getting you to the front page of Google, deceptive, manipulative, and actually some of them may temporarily get you high Google rankings. But then what happens is Google discovers that they're using some illegitimate tactics and then they punish your website in the longer term. So be aware of those services, okay? One place to spend money on is domain registration. I know this sounds strange, but a client of mine says hey George, I found this domain registrar. I can get my domain name for 99 cents. And then I looked into it and they have a very relatively $0.99 versus buying a domain name directly from Google. Google sells domain names now, which is where I put most of my domain names. And Google has the fastest servers. They are the most reliable in terms of the Internet technology, of course. And so yes, domain name from Google cost between 12 to $15 a year. It depends on what which domain name you're getting. Some of them cost up to 20 or 25, but for the dot coms and dot orgs generally they cost about $12 a year per year for a domain name. And you don't need that many domain names. If you're buying a lot of domain names, you should probably stop unless you're actually Building a business on each of those domain names. I used to buy lots of domain names and I ended up wasting hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars over the last 10 years with Domain names that I had good intention to use but never used. And so I only buy domain names now for businesses that I'm intending to build now. So I would recommend Google Domains for getting domain names instead of some cheap place see here. I would recommend in terms of website, a lot of people go with WordPress unless you're already fallen in love with Word, unless you've already fallen in love with WordPress and you're already dedicated to it. You know, if you've done that, that's fine, you've found a way to use it. But I highly recommend if you haven't gone that direction, if you haven't gone in the WordPress direction to consider Weebly. W E E B L Y I have used Weebly now for eight years. They are so reliable and they're always improving their features and it's, you know, quite affordable. When it comes to Weebly includes web hosting. They also will sell you, try to sell you a domain name. I think it's probably okay. But I would rather go with Google for domain names and Weebly for the web hosting and the website design platform. And then you can find affordable help for your Weebly website in terms of technology and design. You can find it on Fiverr F I v e r r.com okay. Another place to not spend your money is on expensive business and marketing training programs. Now I had been around that those circles for really for the first five to seven years of my business. And I used to sell expensive business and marketing training programs. People paid me $2,000 to buy a training program that was just online only. They didn't get a whole lot of access to me, but I created these modules and sold them. Lots of people like to buy it for $2,000 from me. Now I look back, that was the first couple years my business and not that I regret it, but I no longer believe in that model. Especially now there's so much free articles and free videos on YouTube to find free trainings and really get your knowledge from free articles and free just Google what your question is and read the articles. And then if you need help with hand holding, get some coaching or hire a VA to handhold you virtual assistant to handhold you through certain applications of certain ideas. I myself have several coaches, business coaches, business and life coaches. I hire coaches myself because it's been so helpful for me to have someone to bounce ideas with, someone intelligent, someone caring, and to have accountability with a coach is, I think priceless. But don't pay a lot of money for it. Just be careful not to just, you know, you should be able to hire a coach for between 100. A good, reputable and effective coach should, in my opinion, should be between 100 and 250 dollars an hour. At the current time, I charge only 150 dollars an hour. And I recommend when you're buying coaching, really try not to buy a whole package of coaching unless you really have gotten to know that person and you want to commit to a package. But before you've gotten to know them, just buy a month at a time and that would be a better use of your spending I have some more recommended tools that I believe are well worth spending money on. I'll put that in the notes of this video, but I hope that this has been helpful to give you some sense of where I see some of the pitfalls are and instead what are some of the better solutions for spending money wisely. As a business owner, I hope this helps and always I'm open to your questions and your comments and your and your suggestions for future video topics. Be well.