AdSkills: The Power Of Social Media Advertising with John Belcher

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Hey, welcome back to Feed your Brand. And we have a really cool guest today who is a Google AdWords guy who helped form it. So he knows exactly how it works.

Yeah, John Belcher is his name. He got to start working on the Google AdWords team and he really saw an opportunity while he was working there. A gap between the average company's advertising goals and their ability to leverage paid traffic to to make them money. And so he's man is just millions and millions in ad spend, not only while at Google, but after that as a consultant. He's left Google for a number of years now and started another company called Adskills.

And Adskills is a really cool company because it not only teaches people how to place ads and make money placing ads, but it also helps to certify those who are what they call ad buyers. People who do this as a profession, whether you're in a marketing firm or in a big corporation like Coca Cola or Macy's or whatever the company might be that you're working for and that's your job because you can't be losing the company money.

Yeah. And the key referred to it sometimes as a media buyer, if I remember right. Not just and ads are media. Right. And different industries may call it different things. But yeah. What's incredible about ad skills, and you're going to hear it from John in just a couple minutes here, is that he's created this curriculum and some of it is free or you can pay whatever you want to pay for whatever you think it's worth. And then he has other paid programs. But to just start to dive into it and go through his sort of 101 series, if you will, doesn't cost anything. And he's providing a tremendous service here.

Tom and I are always about these rookie errors that cost you tons of money and tons of time. And when we find somebody who's providing a service to help you that has insider secrets, truly insider secrets, not those faux gurus with the insider secrets where they just say that, but truly ones that work, truly ones that came from the inside understanding how something functions and works and helps you avoid the dumb mistakes, those are the people we want to bring to you. And that's why we invited John on the show.

Well, let's go to the interview and then we'll talk a little bit more after.

Well, John, thank you so much for joining us on feed you'd brand today. I'm actually really excited to share with our audience your knowledge or some of your knowledge and a real resource for something we get a lot of questions about.

Yeah, we get questions like this all the time. And it is one of the advice that we give people, John, that it's great to have a podcast, it's great to have a blog. All those things are fantastic. And working to get organic traffic, but at some point you got to start paying for stuff, and the ones that are doing better are paying. So let's talk about some paid ads. But first, tell us a little bit about how you got into this because you came out of Google.

Yeah. So the big thing for me is I was working at Google on the AdWords team, trying to help advertisers figure out how to get started and scale up their businesses using Google. I love the ability to go in and strategize and figure out, say, here's all the different things we could use. We can talk about the Google display network and search ads and YouTube advertising, Gmail advertising. There's so many different options within Google. And so we'd go through and put together this plan and start to execute and just people were not able to turn paid traffic into paying traffic. They couldn't turn clicks into customers. And so that was a really big problem for me. I saw the opportunity of what paid traffic could do for people, but they just didn't have the resources, the education, the information to figure out how to make that convert. And so I said, you know what, There's a big opportunity here. Google is a big company. It's moving fast. They have to keep hitting their quarterly numbers. That's the way public companies work. They can't slow down and teach people, but I can. And so luckily, when I came out, I decided just to straight up quit my job and go start teaching people. I ran into my business partner, Justin Brook. His nickname is the traffic guy that millionaires trust. He's run millions of dollars in ads for really large companies. Snuggie is one of his big clients. He did a bunch of advertising with them. So we teamed up. We've got a combined 17 years and over $20 million in personal ad spend experience. We understand how this stuff works, and we teach People, everything from the basics all the way up to how professionals buy media. And I think the biggest thing that I like to talk about is it's so easy to buy clicks. All you have to do is go in, open your account, swipe your credit card, and you can place ads.

It's a little too easy, right?

It's way too easy. And I'm going through right now and redoing one of our courses to really talk about all the profit is created before you ever spend a single cent. It's kind of going back to the Sun Tzu quotes of like, every battle is won or lost before it's ever fought. That's exactly what happens with paid traffic, is if you haven't thought about your customers and the things that you're offering them and what we call your stages of awareness. There's five stages of awareness. And if you're not talking to the right people at the right time with the right message, getting them the right particular product or pricing based on where it is that they're at, you're not going to be able to turn paid traffic into paying traffic. And so there's all these steps that you have to think about prior to starting your ad campaigns. And most people say, you know what? I just want instant gratification. I'm going to turn on the ads today and I want traffic. It doesn't work that way. You're never gonna see your ROI. So what we really focus on at AdSkills is teaching people how to get what we call the two Cs, confidence and cash flow. It has to start. You put up your blinders. It's so easy to listen to people talk about Facebook, Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, YouTube, Google, AdWords. You should be doing this, you should be doing that. You have to put your blinders on. You have to say, okay, what am I trying to accomplish? Who am I trying to help, and what do I have to offer them? Once you figure that out, now you have the ability to go through and start creating campaigns and planning them out, testing and saying, all right, I actually have a game plan I can go in with. When you have a game plan, you're way more confident. As you start to tweak and see things going, you start to build cash flow. Once you build cash flow, you are excited about paid traffic. You can see how much of a difference it can make. That's what we're all about. We want to build a foundation that you can have those steps to walk through and not feel overwhelmed. I just see way too Many people get overwhelmed with paid traffic.

Oh, my gosh, yes.

That's the thing, isn't it? People come to us all the time, and they know they need to be engaging in some kind of paid marketing program. And it is online social media. That's where it's at today. Right. You're not advertising there. You're yesterday. And they don't know where to begin. It is so complex, and they probably are even more confused because they're always bumping into a day for an expert that tells them something. An expert here at Air Quotes who tells them something different. Oh, it's Facebook. Oh, it's Instagram. Oh, it's this. So your courses really cover all these different platforms, is that right?

Yeah. So what we do is we've got three starter courses that really focus on what it takes to be successful with paid traffic. Our first one's called Traffic Traps. My business partner, I said, 17 years, $20 million in ad spend. We have made every mistake in the book. And so what we've done is say, hey, here's the seven mistakes that cause people profit with paid advertising. So we're going to give that to you. It's a pay what you want course. You can literally pay anything that you want. Here's the seven things that we learned in 17 years that you can learn in 45 minutes. This is where most people go wrong. I've got my Notre Dame football jersey here behind me. He said, before you start winning, you have to stop losing. And that's really what we try and teach in that course is like, here's what you have to stop losing before you can start winning with anything. And then we'll really talk about. I'll start. Good.

No, that's just so great.

It resonates.

Yeah. It resonates here because we also run another podcast called Product Launch Hazards. Pun on the last name intended. Right. And we talk about the hazards of product launching. It's exactly the same thing. There. There are these traps that insiders know that are rookie errors. So you want to go to the football terminology.

Right.

They just happen.

Absolutely.

I'm so glad you put those right up front, because that's what we try to do as well. Because it's so important to stop losing.

Absolutely. You have to stop losing before you can start winning. And so we want to make sure that's front and center. Here's what it takes. And while paid traffic can generate sales immediately. I was just watching the founder recently, the story about Ray Kroc and the guys who started McDonald's wonderful story.

Yes.

But what was really interesting to me is One of the McDonald's brothers says, we are an overnight success, 30 years in the making. Yep. That was his quote. And that's what's really important with paid traffic is it takes time. You have to go through and plan things out. You have to do math. You have to figure out what you can afford in order to be able to say, should I even spend money here? Because your business generates a certain amount of lifetime value from your customers, you have to know what you can afford to spend to generate new ones, or if you can't afford it, you shouldn't even do it. And so it's really important to go through all of the pieces, have your game plan together to build that confidence, start building that cash flow. And so we start with that traffic traps, the big errors that people make. Then we get into customer research, and then we get into tracking. And tracking is everyone's least favorite topic. If I ask you guys about Google Analytics and UTM codes and pixels and conversions, people's eyes glaze over. And so the thing that I really pride myself on is I like to be the nerd. You need to know when it comes to paid traffic. And the reason that people need to know about me is not because I'm the smartest guy in the room. It's because I really spend a lot of time breaking down very complex topics to talk about them in plain English. So I talk about cookies. I talk about actual sugar cookies. And UTM tracking is putting sprinkles on top so you can understand where people are coming from. And your conversions are cookie monsters that are trying to eat those conversions and tell you what's working. And so it's really just trying to break down these super complex topics into something very simple. Because the second you start to become confident with stuff and you can actually just try it out and say, hey, I can just take this little baby step. I can start to move forward. That's where you really start to build that confidence, be successful, and start to build cash flow. So to get back to your question, our courses start with those basics. You can pay whatever you want for those courses. We just want to make sure that you get started down the right path. So with the rest of our courses, then we go through and we start covering the specifics of the individual ad network. So Google AdWords, YouTube advertising, Google Display, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, native advertising can get deeper into tracking. That's really where we try and focus the bulk of our time to say, here's what works. Here's examples of what works, here's the systems and processes we use, and then here's very specific things on each one of these ad networks. Every ad network has what I call a growth hacking hole in it. I rarely run into people who've tried paid advertising. If they haven't cracked the code yet, they say, yeah, I tried it, it doesn't work for me. I lost a lot of money. I hear that all the time. And unfortunately the reason that a lot of people lost money is because they didn't spend their money on what they actually wanted to be advertising on. To give you an example, inside of Google Adwords, when you're doing search advertising, they ask you just to type in the keywords that you want to be advertising on. Well, when you type something in like a normal human being, any normal human being would, that's actually a type of match that's called broad match, which is just absolute garbage. It's going to take the words that you've advertised that you've said, I want to advertise on these, break them apart and say if a search term contains any part of this, we're going to show your ad for it. And so I had a really unfortunate experience recently. There was a woman that I was trying to help with her account and she wanted to be advertising on the term job posting. Now what I just told you, broad match allows Google to basically say, well, we can serve your ad on anything that says job or anything that says posting. And so I got into her account and I showed her keywords actually aren't what's important. What's called search terms is what are important.

Right.

And so I was looking in the search term report and we're looking through it and I can see her getting visibly upset as I'm kind of scrolling through the page and I stop at one point and she'd spent $252 on a term that was an adult term of a job. And I'll just leave it at that.

But it's one of those things where she was very visibly upset. And so the hard part is she doesn't have millions of dollars to spend like some advertisers. She can spend all this money on ads. She's got a set budget that's very important or it's precious to her. And, and just because you didn't know one of these little details inside of these traffic networks, these growth hacking holes, like their sole purpose is to generate more revenue for the ad networks. And so that's that thing is that if you don't know what you're doing, it's very easy to fall into these holes. And so, long story short, I know I spent a lot of time talking about this whole vision. This is why I'm so passionate about it, is I hate seeing people lose their money to things like this. And so that's what we really try and cover in our courses. So that's what we're all about. And so that's what we help people cover.

Wow, that's so valuable because I imagine there was probably, if you knew what to do, a pretty simple way to make sure that your ads are going to go to people searching on both of those words together instead of potentially individually. Right?

Absolutely. You can make it very specific. I only want to advertise on literally the term job posting or job posting New York or job posting Chicago. You can make it very specific. But as I said, these are called growth hacking holes. It's because ad networks employ really smart engineers and their job is to go figure out ways to build the platform to make the ad network more money. And unfortunately, a friend of mine, Mike Rhodes, he literally wrote the book on AdWords, Google AdWords calls it the stupidity tax. It's unfortunately, that's. To me, it's more of the ignorance, the rookie tax of you didn't study to figure out where you could be losing money, and that's kind of the cost of playing the game. And it's really unfortunate to see that. And so that's what we're really trying to say. Here's where you can go wrong and here's what you need to do it the right way.

Oh, it's kind of like my initial foray into Facebook ads manager and then the business manager. And honestly, until just a couple days ago, I didn't even know there was a business manager. But I don't do a lot of that personally. I'm not managing my own ads. I have hired a company that I do trust to do that, but I needed to get them, I guess, registered properly in business manager and just kidding. You did it. I'm like, okay, this is why I hired somebody to help me with this. But not everybody can hire a firm to handle this stuff for them. And I honestly think that we'd probably be better customers if we were a little better educated.

I agree with that too.

Right?

That's right. That's so, so, so. Right. I think that the second part of what you start talking about is that you were mentioning that the dialing into the sort of different social platforms and things. And this is really where I think most people jump in too soon. You probably see this as well. I'm curious to know what you think. But I think people jump in and they're like, well, Facebook ads is the hot thing. So I'm just going to Facebook ad and I look at their business and I go, yeah, I don't think so. I don't think this is right for you. And that's really where we've been way more cautious and encourage caution, especially to our podcasters and making sure that they give their show a chance before they start running paid ads to understand who their customer is. And you talked about you have a research section. Talk a little bit about that for us.

Yeah. So customer research is everything. And a lot of people, when I say that, they say, oh, we have our customer avatar. We're good. We saw something we digital marketer to this, or we did that. We've got our customer Persona down. And that's great. If you've already done that, that's awesome. But where we found what really makes the difference is it's very easy to say, hey, here's some demographic information about the people that I want to be reaching. What we try and do is create a revenue potential opportunity that is skewed in your favor. We call it a profitable population density. We want to try and say this group of people is people that you can actually make money off of if you advertise to them. And so if you take every person between the ages of 25 and 45 that's a marketer and try and spend ads to attract those people, you cannot make money back because there's people that have no money, that have a laptop sitting in their house, that can't afford to buy anything. And if you're trying to market to those people, just because Facebook said marketer, that's gonna include entrepreneurs, people with great marketing backgrounds. And you've got entrepreneurs, people that are sitting in a corner with no money, that are trying to make something happen. And not saying that there's anything wrong with each one of those markets. It's just the fact that you have to create an opportunity for yourself to actually make money. And so you have to go into what we create, what we call angel and demon Persona. So you've got the people that can lift your business to new heights. Those are your angels. And you've got people that if you spend time marketing to them, they're just going to bring your business down because you're going to spend ad money on those people, and they're never going to give you any money back. And so it's really important to go through and find the distinction of this is who we want to be marketing to. A great example is in the supplements business, you kind of have two different types of people from the supplements world. You've got people that they like to weight train and be healthy, but they have a family life and they kind of want a wholesome product. They want something that's beneficial for their entire health. And then you've got people that are bodybuilders. And so if you just said we wanted to market to people who are interested in supplements, you can't cater to both of those markets at once. You have to pick one or the other. And so for every business, either the kind of everyday fitness person is your angel and the bodybuilder is your demon, or the other way around. And if you try and market to both, it's just not going to work. So from the perspective of the people listening to your shows, don't try and talk to a really broad audience. Dial in deep and understand very detailed about these are the people that we actually want to be speaking to that we can make money from. And that's what's so important, is just trying to figure out, all right, this is the group that we can actually have a financial advantage if we speak to them, earn their trust, and help them get to where they want to go.

So I wonder if that would be a really interesting area even for the listeners of this show, Tracy, who are podcasters, and they all have businesses and they all want to be speaking to a certain kind of audience. I wonder if some of the, especially the starter courses here would be helpful for them to learn and understand how to even determine what the audiences are that are out there that they could be tailoring their shows toward or tailoring their shows in a way to meet their business goals.

Yeah. So let's use the example and maybe John can weigh in on this. So when we did our very first podcast three years ago, it's in the 3D printing world. It's called WTFF. 3D printing. And FFF is fused filament fabrication, which is the geeky term for 3D printing. And we chose it because we wanted people in the know and we didn't pay for any ads, mind you. We just started straight into podcasting, and within four months we had 25,000 listeners. So we were really happy with the results of how it launched and what happened for us. But when we went into it, we specifically said, we're not targeting male engineers with CAD skills who might be between the ages of 35 and 60 or whatever it was. We didn't do that. We said, we don't know who our show is going to appeal to, but we want people who know enough to know that they're interested in learning about 3D printing. That's why we chose the name we chose. And then we're just going to keep our content really broad in terms of that to appeal to all ages, all skill sets. But we wanted them to be new to it. That was the only criteria. And it worked really well for us. But over time, we started to realize we actually have niche segments that are really valuable and important to us. Like, we have a gigantic group of educators on our lists. We now have 100,000 listeners. But educators are a big part of it because they're the ones who are thrown into this. Okay, we want to offer 3D printing in the school, figure out what to do, and there was no place to learn. And so it taught us that there was no place to learn. Okay, great. We can develop product around that. So we actually started with the podcast first and then figured out what products to make because we learned our audience. So that's what I think you're saying, Tom, is that similarly, someone could start their show, learn about this ad model, and start to really understand who's being drawn into their show and develop more content, more services, and more things around it.

Well, I think either way, right? I think whether you're starting a podcast and you don't know who your audience is going to be, but you start to learn that over time, and then dial content in specifically for them. Or I think others have an idea of who they do want to attract for their show or the type of customers they want to have, or maybe it's what they want to market to that audience. And I think the reality of advertising today is using one or more of these social media platforms to reach them.

That's the mismatch, though, that you said there, John. That's I want to highlight right there. So the mismatch that I see happen so often is that they start their show, they think it's going to be attractive. They already have an established business or something. They're selling some kind of consulting services in whatever industry. And so they start their show, and then they get subscribers and or email lists built around the show, and then they take that show and they create a lookalike audience on Facebook or wherever they do it and they spend money because they're like, people are listening to my show and they spend a lot of money based on that. And yet the product that they have to offer doesn't resonate that. So it doesn't translate into cash flow as you put it into that. Paid. Yes. They get clicks, but they don't get that conversion.

Yeah, I think so. The biggest thing that both of you said in that discussion was the two words over time. And so what's really important is you define your customer segments better and better and better as you move on. What was great when you started is you knew that you wanted to cater to people in the 3D printing market, so that ffff, you already knew who you were catering to on a small level. So that's kind of where we start, is to say this Persona is going to evolve as you move through things. And for me, you know, I used to run an agency by myself where I was trying to take on clients all the time. And I got to the point, after three years of doing this, I was like, I really don't like working with 95% of these people. I want to focus on what I'm really good at, which is YouTube advertising with companies that have big budgets, products that cater to millions of people. That's what I love to do. And so my customer Persona has evolved as I work through this, to say, this is my skill set. This is what I'm really good at. I'm great at running traffic, and I can get to that point with, this is a product that people want that I'm very good at selling. And so I think that's probably what you did as well, is you started with a passion. I had a passion about doing paid traffic and analytics for people, and it evolved as I went through. I love teaching. That's why we have ad skills, because I love to teach. I don't love running traffic as much. When I run traffic, it's very specific things. For your podcast, you wanted to attract anyone that liked something with 3D printing. But as you move through it, you found those little niches where you actually could develop products. And so now you have multiple customer Personas. You started with one, and it turned into four or five. And here's your different little segments. You can create products, upsells and offers to. That's how a business evolves. And so I think that's the biggest thing, is we're an overnight success, 30 years in the making. Right. As we said earlier, this is the piece for you guys of we started with something, we kept investing it, we kept working on it, we kept talking to customers. I can't tell you how many businesses don't talk to their own customers.

Oh, I know. We deal with this on the product side all the time.

It's like a lookalike audience. Lookalike audiences are amazing. If you're doing advertising, you have a proven funnel. I use them all the time, and we just crush it with them. But that's because we've really done a lot of work and understand who we're selling to. If you're starting something new and you're saying, okay, lookalike, I want to go promote this to people. Just because you're getting people that are subscribing or joining your email list or following your podcast. What's really important is, do you like the people that are subscribing to you? Once figure out who those people are. That's what you want to build lookalikes off. And until you talk to those people and have dialogues and understand if you can solve their problem and it's something you enjoy and you're not dealing with a bunch of complainers and refunders and people like that, that's what this is all about. And so we've changed ad skills multiple times to cater to people. We say we want to cater to people who've lost money with online advertising before, who want to know they have this burning desire to figure it out. They haven't found a teacher that can help them. That's exactly who we want to work with.

That's exactly our podcast model. That's why we have our DIY course, our do it yourself course. It's like practically free because we want that. We're like, if you want to do this yourself, go right ahead. I'm going to teach you everything we do. Because I know at the end of the day, if you're serious, you're going to come back and go, it's not worth it.

Yeah, that I want someone to do it.

I don't have time for this because.

I don't have the time to do it all myself. Where, you know you'd have to hire 5Vs to do it all. No, that's very true.

Yeah, I really love that model.

What's great is always having people ask us at different networking events, conferences, trade shows, whatever. Who do you know that can handle a online marketing campaign for me, an advertising campaign? Who do you know who does a good job at that? And I don't have enough experience with that myself. To be able to refer somebody to someone that I know will do a good job. But I think that now I feel like we have a very good resource to give people to say, well, here's where you can go get educated either yourself to then hire someone with a little more knowledge so you don't make a mistake. Or maybe it's train somebody internally at your company to handle it for you. There's a couple options there.

And the other things, John, in your experience, so those that are running like significant, I would call them bloggers, direct marketers, people who have been really doing this for quite some time. People like us who podcast plus blog. I mean, we're really dialed in into our. To use the term focus keywords, right? So we actually do really understand we're not going to do something general like job posting. How to podcast is not even one of the keywords we ever even talk about. It's always dialed in deeper than that. We have a lot of data and a lot of information. And yet I feel so often companies don't even realize they have that. You talked about like people's eyes glaze over on tracking. But I love the analytics side personally because it shows me what's working and if it's working, I want to do more of it. But so few people actually look at that.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's that piece. When we talk about weight loss stuff, they say the easiest way to lose weight is to track what you eat. Nobody does it right. No one wants to sit there and write down, this is what my food journal looks like. And you watch the people that are very fit. You look at bodybuilders, they write down everything they eat. They write down all their sets. They can go back and look and see the trends. That's just something that they are committed to that most people aren't. And so what I love at the end of the day is, like I said with my consulting clients, I go in and build custom dashboards that pull all of their ad spend into a single dashboard and shows them their cost per acquisition for each one of these traffic channels. And so it's really fun because I've come back to them and it took me, I had to go through and set everything up, tell them from the tracking side, I need to go do this, you know, make this happen. Give me access to these different ad networks and pull together. That's really fun though, when you come back to them and say, look at all the things we did. Now we need to go do this, this and this. Because this is what the data points are telling us. So I'm with you 100%. But the problem is a lot of people don't want to put in the work. Kevin Hart, the comedian, I'm sure most people know who that is. He starts one of his shows, said, everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to put in the work. And that's really when it comes down to these pieces of tracking research, you have to do these things. And so if you're going in with the mindset of I want to get rich overnight, wrong fit. We tell people that right up front in our courses. If you think this is something, you're just gonna come push a couple buttons, go watch a YouTube video, waste some money, and then come back and talk to us. Because it's not how this works. Right. You have to understand, and where we really talk about marketing, marketing is an investment, same thing as stocks and bonds. It's not a guarantee. But what we really love about paid traffic is you actually have the chance to influence the outcome. And if you do a good job influencing the outcome, your income is going to be influenced because of that.

Ah, so. So important.

Fantastic.

Let's talk a little bit about the channels, though, and what you're seeing. So you spend a lot of time on YouTube. And I saw in some of the topic areas you were talking about, let's talk a little bit about what's going on on YouTube.

Yeah, so I think the first thing before we jump into YouTube itself, where I just wanted to cover very quickly, we talked earlier about people say, well, you should do Facebook or YouTube or Instagram or AdWords or GDN or whatever all these different things are. And the problem is, I think everyone thinks that every ad network is like a Swiss army knife. It's like, hey, I can just go try and do this. I'll do everything on Facebook. And where we really work hard is one of the things we teach people. There's a famous copywriter, his name is Eugene Swartz, whose mid-60s wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising. You try and buy it today, it's $400 for the book. It's worth every penny. But you don't see many books that cost $400. But he came up with this model when he was writing copy that's called the five stages of awareness. Going all the way from totally unaware down to the what he calls most aware, what we call offer aware. And what it's talking about is at the bottom level, they already know about you, your business, and what it is that you're selling. They just need a reason to buy up at the top. They don't even know they have a problem. And so what's really important, and we talk about with this framework the whole way through, is every ad network basically says they have the same ability to target people. They have all the same options, interests, topics, keywords, retargeting, look alikes. Every one of them has some flavor of that, but only some of them. Some of those targeting options are superpowers for some and really big weaknesses for others. And so I think that's the biggest piece is understanding which of the ad networks work well to try and reach each one of those stages. Then you put together ads and offers that help convert those. Google is a great network because they're search intent. Google's the number one search engine. YouTube's the number two search engine in the world. There's a ton of search data that you compare and say, hey, we can target people who are in the market for these things, or they're actively reading blogs about these things, or they're watching YouTube videos about these things. So whenever it's the search intent. So YouTube really hits those levels that are further down in the search funnel. So people looking at keywords, the videos, those pieces. But Facebook is really good further up when it's talking about interest targeting because people are expressing every day liking and commenting and sharing. So Facebook doesn't necessarily know as much about your search intent when you're actively looking for something. But further on up when we're talking about the totally unaware or problem aware stages, Facebook is incredible at that. And so I think that's the big thing is don't view an ad network like a Swiss army knife where it can do everything you want to look at it like a spoon or a knife or a fork. You're not going to try and eat soup with a knife, right? It's not a good fit and you're not going to try and cut steak with a spoon. And so it's really just trying to figure out which levels of awareness are you catering to, what's the offer, what kind of ads you need to have, and which ad network is really good at that. I just wanted to preface that because I think that helps people get an idea of, oh, okay, I see. Now Google AdWords is good for lower in the funnel because people are actively searching for this. But if they have no idea of their problem, AdWords is a terrible network for that. And so I think it's really important to categorize those things.

So while it. And so what you're saying is, while we're going to ask some questions about maybe a couple of the different platforms, your point is, you know what, a good campaign may involve several of these platforms at different points because of what they make sense for or the unique aspects of the campaign, or the funnel you're doing.

Absolutely. And I'll share a resource with you. It's a PDF that we put together. It's called the network funnel. It talks about here's the five stages of awareness, here's the type of targeting you can utilize, and here's the best networks for that. So I'll share that with you. And you're here, you could have that for your listeners. But yeah, you're absolutely right with that.

So you talked about something called the organic halo effect of YouTube. What does that mean?

Yeah, so my nickname for YouTube is the three card Monty ad platform. And for anyone that doesn't know Three Card Monty, if you go to New Orleans or any big city, you. New Orleans is the one that I always see these guys out, but they basically will go out, set up a cardboard box, and they'll have three cards and they'll put like a marble underneath one of them. They'll move the cards around. It's your job to pick out the marble. They'll have a person there. They set up at the beginning, so you're the idiot that they're trying to get. And they'll have some other guy playing and he'll point out and he'll get it right three times in a row. And then they call on you and you're like, oh, it's under the middle card. And it's never under the middle card. You're going to lose your money every single time because you don't know where to look. And so I think that's the biggest thing with YouTube is the organic halo effect, where I see a lot of people be unsuccessful. What I call the big YouTube problem is people have made something work on Facebook and they say, hey, we've got these videos that are working on Facebook. They're killing it. Let's move over to YouTube and just double down and we'll be able to make a bunch of money. And they are very disappointed because they say, well, my cost per view on YouTube is more expensive and my clicks are 10 times more expensive. It just doesn't work. And so what I always talk with people about is understanding the difference between the networks on Facebook. You're looking for a distraction. You're literally scrolling Trying to find something you care about on YouTube. You came there for a reason, to watch a video. There's two reasons people come to YouTube. To be educated or to be entertained. So if you're being educated, you're watching a how to video. I'm not clicking away from that. I'm not going to click on an ad. I came here to learn how to fix my radiator or put my car back on my tire or any reason that you came there to learn how to do something, or you came there for entertainment. There's YouTube shows. I watch football replays. YouTube was the number one online streaming platform for music until very recently. It was bigger than all the other streaming platforms combined. People go to YouTube to listen to music, so they're there for a reason. And so even if you have a great ad, you know, think of the best ads. The dollar shave clubs, the poo pourris, the squatty potties. Like, those are the very famous ones. Those are great ads. People did not click on those ads. They were still there for a reason. What they do is they open a new tab and they search. And that's because I'm still on YouTube. I want the answer to whatever I came here for. But if I open up a new tab and I search for it, well, that's going to show up in the organic traffic bucket. And so the organic halo that I talk about is when people watch a YouTube ad, most of the time they'll open up a new tab, search for it, and all of the results that you're getting from YouTube are showing up in your organic or direct traffic. That's where that's going to show up inside of that halo. And so it's really important to understand that, or otherwise you're going to be extremely disappointed. You're comparing Facebook to YouTube, which I say is like comparing apples to Japanese. It just doesn't make sense. And so that's that piece of, like, having the right expectations going in and knowing where you need to look for your results is extremely important if you ever want to be successful with paid advertising.

Interesting.

Wow.

Wow. Oh, so wonderful. Well, I mean, we could talk for hours, I think. But what I really want to do is make sure that we're leaving our audience with just understanding of how broad the services and education you can give them. So you not only take them from this very, very beginning, but you can take them all the way to building their own internal team. Could you just talk a little bit about what it is? You call it a media buyer, which is a term many of us aren't used to. But what does that mean? To become a certified media buyer?

Yeah. So what we really try and do at adskills, we want to turn out people who are professionally trained to buy advertising, which is another name for buying advertising, is a media buyer. And so even if that's you, if it's your own business, you're still gonna be trained like a professional in the fact that you'll understand how professionals do it. And so if you get to the point where you're being successful, you've got confidence and cash flow and you're gonna hire somebody else, that's totally fine. You'll have the skills and the knowledge to be able to hire effectively. But what we really try and do is we know that there's a lot of businesses out there that are currently working with agencies that don't like the agency model. They don't wanna have to pay the overhead, the retainers, the ongoing fees, the percentage of ad. They would like to build an internal team that they have employees that are doing their advice for them, that are educated and have access, whenever they don't know the answer to something, to talk to people who do this for a living. That's what we're building at adskills. We're trying to build a university for media buyers so you can come in, get the education that you need to have the systems and processes. We say amateurs make amateur mistakes because they don't have processes and systems. We're giving you the professional systems and processes to understand how professionals do that. The planning that we put in, we do math, we do planning, we do research, we go through and put together a campaign plan, and then we execute efficiently. If you have someone on your team that you want to get trained, they can come in, become a ninja at what they do, and be able to turn around and make a huge profit for you. That's really what we work for. And so I think that's the biggest thing, is just having people understand there's a lot of money out there for agencies. All you have to have is a computer and a phone to run an agency. That's, to us, can be a threat to a lot of people, to a lot of businesses. You can work with poor agencies, and if you do work with the good ones, they're really expensive. So it's trying to find a happy medium in there where you've got really good people that work for you. So that way it's a fixed cost instead of a variable cost. You have the opportunity to Scale up on what you're doing. So I don't know if that gave enough background. Do you feel like that was a good answer to your question?

No, it was perfect and really makes a lot of sense and gets you started thinking about that process. I think the only other question I kind of want to coach that with is for those that are thinking about growing or the growth pace of their business, how long should you really allow for someone to really train and become ready or for yourself if you're launching a brand or a business? You know, really, how long should you allow through that sort of training and early research stage of dialing things in.

And getting it right where we really work from the timeframe perspective. What I've found with people is if you can get started and you go through the basics, really understanding this is where most people fail. And these are the things that you need to do. I'm putting together a roadmap right now for people that are just struggling to figure out how to prioritize paid traffic. It's literally like do step one, step two, step three, step four. And until you check these off, you can't move on to the next one. You have to have your customer Persona before you can move on to creating offers. You have to understand who you're selling to. But what's really important there is as long as you're willing to dedicate to actually putting these things together. To me, you can get a lot of the basics put into place on a basic level in a month. You can get all of it done in a month. And I think it's something you just spend an hour a day going in and figuring out, hey, I'm just going to spend a little time researching on Facebook the people who follow me. And these are people who are buying from me, and I can understand a little bit more about them. What they look like, what's the demographic, what do they do? Do they have families? You can just start to understand more about people. And you don't have to spend a ton of time doing this, but a little bit every day will help you get to that point where you've got the basics in place. And then what you start to do is put together campaigns. You can execute those. What's really important to me is the planning process takes the most time. Execution is very simple. We've given you a framework. You go in, you execute, and you're able to run your campaigns. You can tell within three days if things are moving in the right direction. And so that's where you start to just kind of progress slowly. And like I said, the whole goal here is to build confidence and cash flow. And so what's fun is as you start to see that success, you're going to get more excited about it, and you're going to start saying, hey, we're doing well on Facebook. How can we try out AdWords? How can we try out YouTube? How can we try out Twitter? To continue to expand what you're doing? And so it's a snowball effect. So I think at the end of the day, if you held a gun to my head and said, how long is it going to take someone to get trained to be pretty good? It would probably take them about six months to really feel confident, like they understand what they're doing, and they're really able to generate a really big, positive return for your business. But you can get started and be successful within six weeks of just understanding the basics and not being the idiot out there. As we talked about the idiot tax, I don't want you have to pay the idiot tax. It's going to take you more than reading a single blog post. But we spend. I spend hours boiling down these complex things that we've learned over 17 years into very digestible bites in order to help you get there quickly.

Interesting.

Oh, well, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us, John. We really appreciate you being on our show.

Loved being here. Thank you so much. And if you have me back, we'll talk some more about YouTube. There's some cool stuff.

Oh, definitely. Let's do a whole show on that.

So I want to take ad skills.

I think every business owner that has a need to actually advertise on Facebook, YouTube, any of these places should.

Right. It's not because I intend to place ads or do any of that myself, but I feel like you can't as. And I'm the chief marketing officer of Brandcasters. Right. So I'm a cmo. And so my role here is to make sure that we aren't hiring the wrong experts. And some of the things John said today make me question our experts, make me question the process. Right, right. And so this is just advice, and it's a little casual. I want to dive deeper in because I'm a researcher. Right. And I like to know the details because I think it's going to make me better able to guide that process and better able to hire the right resources to accomplish my goal. That would be a better use of our funds.

Yeah. I got to tell you, I was very impressed With John, not only with what he has done with his company and what's available there for people. And by the way, since we have recorded this, we've actually recommended other people we know in business go and to add skills and take some of his courses.

Have you had anyone come back yet who's taken it?

I haven't at this early stage. We've definitely recommended it to people and we do need to follow up with them and see what their experience has been and I think we should also follow up after our own experience.

Yeah, I mean I'm about to head out to do A and a Q and so my intention is to spend the month of August actually diving into ad skills because I know I'll be back from this trips and likely it'll be less I can concentrate on it because I hate to do it in little bits and pieces. I'm more of a like let's dive in and swim through the ocean and figure out what's going on here. But I will report back. I'll do a follow up episode to let you know what I found and what I found valuable. But I also want to make sure that we realize that we're putting out a second episode.

Yeah, we need to lead to let everybody know what's coming. Because after we ended the interview with John, we had some discussion off air.

Well, we had had it a little bit on air where you hear that he teases about some YouTube tips. Right. And we didn't get to it because it was just already so long and we were kind of running out of time and then we got a little off topic and talking about something a little more exciting. But YouTube is so important to so many of our video casters out there and so many of our podcasts are utilizing YouTube in various ways and we are personally putting in a YouTube ad strategy as a part of our marketing plan. So we were so excited that he offered us a whole extra amount of time to talk about YouTube so we decided to separate it and put it in its own episode so it's following this.

So watch for that next episode. It's going to take a deeper dive into that and we'll obviously introduce that at the beginning of that episode. So there's more to come from John. If you enjoyed this interview, just wait for the next one.

That's right. So thank you so much for joining Feed your Brand today and you know you can find us anywhere on social media. Edyourbrand and you can also go to the website FeedYourBrand Co and get the blog post with all the links and all of the different things that John talked about.

All right. Well, thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed. You'd brand.