Stop Running Ads On THIS

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. So the other day, this guy I’m talking with, he’s another co, another business owner. He’s looking to grow his organic audience and he’s asking questions about YouTube ads and Instagram ads. And he’s like, how much money are you spending running YouTube ads to your channel? And I looked at him, I was like, zero. $0. We’ve never spent a single dollar driving traffic to our channels, ever. And neither should you. If you’re thinking right now that the way to grow your organic audience is by boosting posts or spending ad money on Facebook, on YouTube to drive traffic back to your channel.

And with the hopes of getting more subscribers and followers, I want to encourage you to please, please stop doing this. Stop wasting your money. It’s, and it truly is a waste of money for a number of reasons. Number one, the quality of the audience that you’re assembling through paid advertising is very, very low. So you might have a very big number of people following you, but your engagement’s going to be low. The number of prospects that are actually your ideal avatar who you could convert into being a paying customer, it’s very, very low. And so if you want to spend money to build out a vanity metric, such as number of subscribers, number of followers, go for it. You can do that.

You can boost the post, get it in front of more people. But in my experience, this is a very terrible long term strategy for growing your audience. I believe that the only times that you should be running ads for anything is when it’s leading to an outcome that you can ultimately control. And what I mean by that is if you drive traffic to your YouTube channel with the hopes of boosting the visibility, getting more subscribers, the problem is you’re only growing on that channel first and foremost. I already laid out the other reasons why this is a bad idea, but it’s also a bad idea because you don’t control that audience in any kind of meaningful way. I can’t reach out to all 228,000 people who follow me on YouTube. I can make a video, I can make a post, but YouTube is going to distribute that to however many people that they ultimately want to, and I don’t have any say over that. And so by spending money to build an audience I don’t actually control, I’m really just wasting money on something that one isn’t going to translate to the outcomes I want.
And number two is long term, it’s not a compounding vehicle. The compounding vehicle would be to drive traffic to your email list, to your website, to some form of media that you can have the control of the relationship. So we want to get their email address, maybe we get their phone number, we get them on a phone call, whatever. We need to have a way of reaching back out to our people. And if you’re going to drive ads towards anything, that’s what you need to be driving it towards. Now I’m not a big fan of driving ads towards lead magnets and just getting people into your email list. I don’t like that because again, it’s low quality people coming in who just want free stuff, they’re going to clog up your email list. Again, you’ll grow your email list, but your actual click through rate and your open rates will be very, very low.
I was talking with a gentleman two weeks ago down in Cancun who has a list of 6000 people but he only has a 10% open rate. And I was like, dude, you need to clean up that list. It doesn’t do you any good to have 90% of the people not opening your email. That’s hurting your deliverability. It’s not getting to the people who actually might want to open your message because the email providers are looking at this and being like this is just spam, right? So you need to clean up your list, get it down to, you know, 2000 people. Suddenly your open rate would go to a 30% open rate. Now you’re cooking, now you’re cooking with butter. But the problem is when we run ads, that’s the type of audience that we’re getting.
We’re getting people who aren’t actually going to engage with the emails and the content, right? So we don’t want to drive paid ads towards free products. Now when we do run ads and ads can be great, we run them towards an offer that ideally liquidates the cost of that ad spend. So we send them to a landing page where they buy this $50 product, this hundred dollar thing, this $200, whatever. You sell them on a product that in that moment would cover the cost of acquiring that customer. So if it costs us dollar 20 to get a lead from Facebook, then we would ideally want that product on the landing page to be enough to cover the cost of the acquisition. So if that’s a $20 ebook, right, then what happens is that person has shown they’re the type of person who buys so they show buyer’s intent, which makes them a much more high quality lead than anybody who signs up for something free, right? They bought the thing. We’ve liquidated the cost of our ad spend, so we acquired that customer for free, Haza. And then we have the ability to nurture that relationship on the backend and upsell them to the higher products.

And that is going to be where all of our margin, all of our profit comes from. So that’s the ideal way that you do this. But you really should not be running ads to build an audience. That’s the wrong way to do that. Because if we’re built, if we’re spending ads to build an audience that we can sell later, then the question is, why don’t we just run ads to sell those people now, get rid of all the people in the middle who never had any intention of buying, period, and just go straight to the people who are buying and actually grow our business. Because at the end of the day, likes ain’t cash. Having 100,000 subscribers is not the same as having $100,000 in your bank account. If you had to choose between the two, which would you prefer? Most people are going to take the money, right? So we need to have a way of converting our audience into outcomes for our business, for our bank accounts.

That’s the goal of this whole thing. And so it’s not just about growing the vanity metrics. And if it is, then you’re doing the game wrong. You’re going to learn the hard way, you’re going to burn a whole lot of money, and you’re ultimately not going to actually get to where you want to go. So hope this brings you a little bit of value. Maybe if you were boosting posts and running ads, this talks you out of that, and now you can reapply your efforts towards an outcome that will actually deliver the results that will get you closer to your goals. So take this run with it, and I will see you guys tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.