Hands up who’s ever promoted a blog post through Facebook ads?
Keep your hand up if you’ve NOT read Scientific Advertising, written by Claude Hopkins 100 years ago in February 1923?
If your hand is up, my blogger friend, there are two reasons you should keep reading.
1. I’m going to explain why Facebook has tricked you into throwing away your money.
2. I’ll also give you a better way to buy Facebook ads. One that will save you a LOT of money and INCREASE your conversions.
Since you’re paying for advertising, I’m going to assume that you’re not just blogging for fun. You’re probably selling some high-ticket product or service off the back of your blog. Right?
Obviously, no one’s going to buy this high-ticket product or service the first time they see it. They need to get to know your brand over a series of interactions, and that’s the role your blog plays. Right?
I’m also going to assume you’ve got your Facebook pixel on your blog, letting Facebook keep a note of who’s visited which pages, and allowing you to run re-targeting ads to those people. Right?
In my opinion, re-targeting is a money grab by big tech companies like Facebook. One that tricks advertisers who don’t know any better into overspending on their campaigns. I also think that smart advertisers can get by without any re-targeting.
Let me explain why, with an example.
You’re selling a product for $100 off the back of your blog. You know that people won’t buy it the first time they see it.
So, you run two ads. One that promotes your blog to new visitors, and one that re-targets people who have already been to your blog.
The first ad gets 100 clicks. That means that the second ad can reach 100 people (assuming you don’t have other traffic sources.)
Let’s say that I am a competitor in the same market as you, selling a similar $100 product off the back of my own blog. But, instead of running two Facebook ads, I just run one.
My ad doesn’t actually send people to my blog at all. It points to an opt-in page that offers a free gift in exchange for an email address. Then, once I have the email address, I send them repeatedly to my blog for free.
My ad also gets 100 clicks. Out of the 100, 15 of them opt-in.
Let’s look at two differences between me and you.
1. You narrowed down your audience to 100 but I narrowed down my audience to 15.
2. You have to continue paying Facebook to send your 100 people back to your blog, but I can send my 15 back to my blog for free through email.
Who’s the smarter advertiser between you and me?
It depends on one thing, and that’s whether my free gift is congruent with my high-ticket offer. If not, the most targeted prospects for the high-ticket offer may NOT have been among my 15 free gift takers, while they ARE more likely to be among your 100 blog visitors.
If it is highly congruent, though, I’ve just saved a LOT of money that you haven’t.
The best way to keep the free gift congruent? Make it a free SAMPLE of the high-ticket offer.
This principle is nothing new. Claude Hopkins described the use of samples in his landmark book, Scientific Advertising, which was published a full 100 years ago in February 1923.
When your advertising is for a product with a long sales cycle, you NEED to cut that cycle short by offering a free sample in exchange for contact information.
It’s the only way you can separate the people who might buy from the people who will never buy, and it’s the only way you can save yourself from spending a fortune on repeated advertising to both groups.
Using this principle, smart online advertisers CAN still advertise on platforms like Facebook in a cost-effective way.
But what if you didn’t NEED to know about pitfalls like this before you start?
What if your advertising service didn’t try to trick you to waste your money to begin with, and what if it even provided you with the TRAINING to advertise in a cost-effective way?
That’s why I created The Online Economy in 2018, and for the last four years, I’ve been building the technology behind this new-generation advertising service.
We don’t even allow anyone to advertise on The Online Economy UNLESS they are offering a free or low-cost sample. We don’t actually WANT them to make any of the common advertising mistakes that have been popularised by platforms like Facebook.
Unsurprisingly, there are a number of these common mistakes, and re-targeting all of your website visitors is just one of them.
So, if this money-saving tip was valuable to you, you’ll also get value from another two money-saving tips coming in parts 2 and 3 of Smarter Online Advertising.
For example, do you worry about losing money as a result of your ads being clicked by bots rather than real people (a.k.a. ad fraud?) In part 2 of this series, I’m going to share a surprisingly simple way to avoid being the victim of ad fraud.
Like today’s solution, the next solution was also outlined within the pages of Scientific Advertising 100 years ago.
(If you’re wondering how that’s possible, given that bots didn’t exist yet, you’ll have to read part 2 to find out.)