Episode 42: In Defense Of My Controversial Facebook Ad Advice

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey everyone, this is Julie and today I wanted to do a podcast in defense of my controversial Facebook ad advice. Alright, so about two weeks ago, I went to the 2 comma Club X systems event, Waffle Mastery Event training. It's had several different names. The point of the event was to help people with their offers and their sales funnels, their messaging, their traffic. And I got up and spoke for about three hours and gave some advice on stage that a lot of people were surprised about. I told them that I thought that the advice about starting with, you know, 50 $100 in ad spend and sort of dipping your toe in the water was terrible advice and that you should do the opposite, that you should actually spend a large amount of money, which that's all relevant because to some people what I'm about to say is going to not seem large and to other people it will seem like an astronomical amount. But you want to spend a large amount of money in a short period of time when you begin Facebook ads. So let me dive a little bit into the context of why I said it and why people freaked out. So when I say large amount of money, what I mean is when you have a sales funnel built, whether you're selling a $27 ebook, a $97 course, a $497 business in a box style program, the idea is that you need to give Facebook a chance to figure out where your customers are. And I know that when you sign up, when you go in the ads manager and stuff, there's targeting. You can target people who like Marie Forleo, people who like Russell Brunson, things like that. But the reality is that Facebook is going to figure out, based on the behavior in the newsfeed, who actually likes your ad. But in order to figure that out, it needs to get your ad in front of enough people that it can start to detect patterns, similarities in audiences. So when you start a funnel and you start ads and you don't give Facebook A lot of money. You only give them, you know, whatever, $50, $100, $200. Because the platform is so crowded with advertising, you can't really get in front of many people. Maybe you get in front of 100 people, right? And 100 people is not enough for Facebook to determine who your customer is. Because remember, of a hundred people, if we're using funnel math, we know that even the greatest funnels out there can only, like, maybe at Most boast a 5% buy rate, which means out of 100 people, you're really only attracting five buyers. And Facebook needs a minimum of 100 buyers to really be able to nail down who your audience is. Because, remember, as much as Facebook is fickle, if it also cares about delivering a good user experience, so it's in Facebook's best interest for it to find your customer just as much as it is in your best interest for your ad to perform well. So we're not at odds with Facebook. We're both working towards the same goal, which is a relevant ad in a newsfeed to the right customer to get a purchase. So the advice about finding a couple of audience and starting at $5 a day is old advice. And if you think of your sales funnel like a rocket ship, and you want to test your rocket ship, you've been working on it for a long time, and you want to see if it can fly, my question to you is, you know, a rocket ship is a lot more money than a sales funnel. It's like, whatever. I was watching this documentary with Elon Musk, and it's like his rocket ships weren't like, they were, like, disposable, meaning, like, you use it once, and then it. And then it's done. And it was like $60 million to build one. He had, like, enough money to build three. He had three chances, right? And so can you imagine if he had built that rocket ship and then didn't give the engine enough fuel to actually get off the ground? It's like, all right, we just spent $60 million on this rocket ship. We're going to try to launch it in space, and we're going to just. I think what we're going to do is we're going to run down to the convenience store, we're going to get one of those little cigarette lighters. You guys run down and light the cigarette lighter under the rocket, and let's see if our rocket flies. That's absurd. That's what you're doing when you spend little amounts of money on your sales Funnel. You are trying to make decisions about whether your sales funnel works by giving it a tiny little puff of fire and expecting that Facebook is going to be able to figure out who. Who your customer is. With so little fuel, it is completely bananas. What is actually much, much more effective is to take your rocketship sales funnel and give it the best, most highest octane quality fuel you can find. Right? Because then you're going to have more data. You're going to actually be able to see how it's functioning out there in the wild, as I like to say about sales funnels. So my actual advice is that you spend about $1,000 in 72 hours. This works out to be approximately $300 a day. Now there's, you know, there's. That's like average. You could spend more, you could spend a little bit less. You could also lengthen the time. But remember, the amount of money you're spending in the time frame matters, too. It's important that you give it enough fuel to get off the ground. Think of that rocket ship analogy. So why is this controversial? Well, it's controversial because it sort of bucks what has been sort of, you know, out there as, like, the best advice. And number two, a lot of people have said to me, Julie, that's very irresponsible of you to tell people to spend so much money on the outset when the offer is unproven. People are going to waste a lot of money. And it's funny because, you know, they take my advice, but they take it out of context, Right? They forget that what I did for the entire two hours before I got got to that piece of advice was explain to them how to build a good sales funnel that has a high likelihood of being successful ultimately. Again, I'm going to pull the rocket ship analogy here. If you're going to test a rocket ship, you're going to build the best damn rocket ship you can, and you're not going to skimp around. And so the two hours of training I did was showing them, hey, listen, don't just, like, make up some sales funnel that is not using proven methods. Build a good sales funnel. Learn all of these tricks of the trade, like, use these checklists. Make sure you're proud of it. Make sure it has this sort of like, hell, yeah, this is an amazing offer. Make sure you have all that before you go. Stick the sales funnel in front of a Facebook ad. A Facebook ad is going to amplify what already is. It's not going to turn something crappy into something good. So that's the first thing is people take all of that out of context and they say, well, you just spent $1,000 in three days and you know, that's all your money. Well, maybe you shouldn't play this game if that's all the money you have. That would be my response. My response would be like, maybe go freelance, maybe go get a job, maybe get some capital. You need capital to invest. Like it does not just fall out of the sky. And you know, another reason why I give this advice is because I've seen a lot of dabblers, and these are people who stick their toe in the water. They spend a couple hundred dollars, maybe over like two weeks time, they determine that their funnel doesn't work, they get disillusioned and one of two things happen. They either abandon the game or they think that their funnel doesn't work, and then they go off and try to build another funnel, and then they build another funnel and then they try that one and then they spend a couple hundred dollars and that one doesn't work. It doesn't matter how many times I get on my soapbox and tell people that you cannot determine the success or failure of a funnel until you've given it enough juice and enough time to optimize. I literally could say this right now and my dearest mastermind students could then go and turn on ads, and in 12 hours I will have a desperate, scared voxer message saying it's not working, even though I told them this is what you're going to expect. So the problem with the dabbling advice is that people draw all kinds of wrong conclusions and then they spend, over the lifetime of their online business journey, thousands and thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours waste building funnels, changing offers. Pivot, pivot, pivot. Shiny objects. New mentor, new instructor. Oh, let me try that $5,000 program. Let me try that thousand dollar course trying to fix something that wasn't even broken in the first place. They just were not giving, they were not betting hard enough on themselves, on their sales funnel, on their rocket to give it enough fuel to give Facebook a chance to optimize. And I have seen this happen over and over and over again. And the dabbling mindset is done and death like it is death in the advertising world. And I know that it seems like a lot of money to spend, but what will happen is you will build a better funnel. If I tell you in my programs, if I say I am not going to work with you unless you're willing to spend $1,000 in 72 hours, you are going to build a better funnel because you're like, oh, crap, yeah, okay, I got $1,000 in three days. I better make sure that I've done my due diligence. I better make sure that my offer is good. I make sure, better make sure that I'm really proud of it. And then you should also have the expectation that after you've spent $1,000, you will not be profitable. Anybody who expects to build a million dollar funnel needs to understand that you are not going to be profitable at first. So what you have to do is get into this mindset. I'm going to spend that thousand dollars just to pay for data. I need data from Facebook to tell me how poorly I'm doing. Basically is what you're doing. After you have that thousand dollars, now you have some information, now you have some traffic, now you can start to see where the problems are. You're going to do a round of edits, a round of optimizations, and then you're going to go back into the arena, you're going to spend another thousand dollars. Okay? Now when you get that data back, there may be something wrong with your funnel or there may be something wrong with your ads. So how you optimize and how you fix is very different. Okay, but maybe, maybe you actually have amazing data. You're just not quite profitable yet because maybe your ad costs were a little high, your pixels new, it's not totally seasoned yet or something, but like, you can still look at the data and be like, oh, look, this is actually, this has promise. You do an optimization, you spend another grand. Now maybe this time you're not profitable, but you're close to breaking even. That is such a good sign. That is such an exciting sign. So now you go through round two, then you spend another thousand. This time you break even. Okay, so the first time, let's just say you blew $1,000 and didn't get any conversions. Okay? So you're 1,000 in the hole. The second time you made $500, but you spent $1,000, so you're $500 in the hole. So now you're $1,500 in the hole. The third time, you break even. So guess what, you're still $1,500 in the hole, but you're not anymore in the hole. The next time, let's say you're profitable at $500. Now you're only in the hole 1000, and then the next month you gross $82,000 after spending 30. That is literally what can happen. But most people will never do that. 99% of people even listening to this podcast or in my groups will not do this because they are afraid, because they are following bad advice, because they are unwilling to put in the work. But at any point in that process, if you stopped and only gave Facebook a few hundred dollars just to give, you know, just to see, you know, just dabble, you would have gotten disillusioned, right? Or if you just built, like, kind of a crappy funnel because you don't have that much at stake, there's not enough skin in the game for you to, like, push harder and do a better job. Okay? Or maybe you would just go off the rails and go build another funnel because that one didn't work. And so to all the people who say that I'm giving controversial, irresponsible advice. And you know what, guys? It's not really that many people, but some people. Actually, I did get probably 10 to 15 people afterwards be like, whoa, Julie, that was really. That was really ballsy of you to say that. I'm telling you that if you start thinking with the mindset of, I'm not getting in this game unless I'm willing to get in the arena, I'm not going to dabble. I'm not going to just, like, sit on the sideline. Because I guarantee you the fastest way to get disillusioned, depressed, think you suck, and to walk away from this game or to follow another shiny object is for you to build a rocket ship and then expect a cigarette lighter to get it off into the sky. Don't do it. It's not a good idea. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you're listening to this and you're like, it all makes perfect sense, Julie. I get it. I don't have $1,000 to spend. That's okay. You don't have to go do Facebook ads. You can do organic Facebook marketing. You can do organic Instagram marketing. You can do organic YouTube marketing. You could do podcast marketing. You could do Pinterest marketing. You could do blogging and SEO marketing. There are so many other ways to get traffic. Is it going to take you a lot longer? Yes, it will. Is that okay? Yes, 100% it will. But you know what? If you don't have the capital, you have the time, then do it that way. But once you're ready to play the Facebook ads game, play it. Like, suit up and pull up your bootstraps and actually play the game. Don't dabble. It's not going to do you any favors. And of course, make sure that the funnel is a funnel that you're really proud of. All right, guys, I hope that was helpful. I will talk to you soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today. It.