If you’re impressed by social media accounts saying they got where they are “without ads”, you’re either broke, or Highlander.
If you’re Highlander, you have infinite time to post on social media and find out what works, but I’d suggest you could do something more constructive with your gift of immortality.
If your excuse is that you’re broke, I hate to tell you, but you’re not.
You’ve just chosen to spend your money on something other than learning to grow your business.
I funded my first Facebook campaign by quitting drinking for a month.
If you want it enough you’ll find a way.
But even if you only have $10 to spend, I suggest you spend it.
There’s something magical that happens the moment you turn on a paid ad campaign.
A sense of urgency surges in.
You start looking at your offer more critically. You look at your opt-in pages with a new eye.
You look at that all those sexy sliding images that were so important when you were designing the site, and decide they’re just slowing things down.
For some reason our minds can grasp the concept of wasting money better than they can grasp the concept of wasting time.
You finally fire up a spreadsheet and start working out things like your cost of acquisition, average order values and lifetime values.
You start looking at what happens to each lead as every each hour and day slips past.
All these things were already happening with your social posting, but now you have a spotlight on them.
Once you see it you can’t go back.
Because you know each post on social could have been driving people to an email list or a sale.
This is the change in your marketing we want to see.
A bit more direction in your content, a bit more impatience for the sale, a bit more recognition of what a customer really costs, a bit more effort to keep them.