Why Paid Ads Aren’t A Good Bet For Beginners (How We’ve Done $350k In 9 Months With Free Traffic)
I hope you’ll find value in the concepts I discuss and look forward to personally helping you on your journey to success. Let’s get right into things! The Value Of Paid Ads (and the cons, silos) Most people think the only way to test products and get sales is to spend money on paid advertising…if you’re searching on the internet about how to make money in ecommerce, chances are you’ve been taught to run Facebook Ad Sets to test winning products. You’ve probably tried going that route, and you probably had mixed results at best. Which is okay. Since starting my first successful brand (in April 2021), I’ve tested out a few different “paid” sources of traffic, ranging from Instagram Influencers, YouTube video reviews, Sponsored articles, and Google Ads. All of these paid advertising platforms I tried using missed the mark in terms of relevancy and conversion when compared to the type of organic traffic I’ve generated from shear interest and “chatter” in my niche. I believe the only real value in running paid ads as a beginner is showing Retargeting Ads to website visitors who decided not to purchase, but this is an advanced technique and is not a requirement for finding initial success! Now, I will admit that our product is restricted from a majority of the major ad platforms because of the “high risk” niche we are in, but this ended up teaching me a powerful lesson on how to generate organic interest and influences the approach I recommend to other beginners. From my experience, I’ve found a much more reliable path to finding a winning product and growing with little to no initial investment and minimal risk. Let’s call this “lean ecommerce”. By the way guys, I’m an experienced WordPress developer who has been working with people from various industries. I’m looking for 5 more volunteers who are willing to let me design a free website for them to expand my portfolio. The website would be at no charge; the only requirement is that you have a real, running business and cover the basic costs like domain and hosting which is inexpensive. Please PM me if you’re interested and I’ll share more details. If You Want To Make Sales, You Need To Deliver The Right Value My goal with this post is to help you focus your attention down to the elements that will create a successful product and brand. …And it’s totally doable. To give a little history of my path to success, I want to admit that in my first attempt at ecommerce I wasted about $300 (this is very little compared to stories I’ve heard) running Facebook ads for a product I thought was a “good product”. I had no clue what I was doing at the time but I followed a very basic outline of Shopify Dropshipping I learned from watching a webinar ran by Alex Becker.. I was even using basic product pictures straight from the AliExpress listing. When I reflected on my failed attempt, I started to noticed how impersonal the whole process had been. There was no connection to my customer, no relevancy to what they we’re doing on Facebook when then saw my ad, and little connection to anyone with similar interests to them. I realized that I was trying to sell a product I didn’t care about myself. This was the moment I started considering myself as my best customer and being mindful of my experience of the products I was using on a daily basis. What value were they offering me, and what value was I still missing? This is where I started to build my intuition for a new product idea, and I recommend you start practicing the exact same thing. As time goes on, you’ll make connections between different products and markets that might not have stood out to you otherwise, and chances are you’ll find a “space” to provide value. This should get you excited and take up more of your free time (you’re essentially starting out as a DIY project) if it’s something you’re truly interested in! At the core, this is what fuels the success of my current brand and is a fundamental concept to finding products that sell well. The goal is to use your own passion and problem solving skills to find a product that practically speaks for itself; all you have to focus on is making the customer aware that it exists. That’s when the sales will start rolling in! I’ll dive more into some good places to start sharing products with potential customers in the next lessons. This post is intentionally light on strategy and tactics, but it’s meant to make you think about what you’ve been doing through now. Until you change the way you look at yourself and the value you bring to the table, you’re not going to be able to apply the concepts of this course. The first change you need to make to your business is internal. I do have a little “homework” assignment that I can post in the comments if anyone is interested. There are more lessons I have planned if the response is positive! And if your looking for to design a website for your business, I’m willing be happy to help 5 people design a websites for people for free in return I ask for your permission to add your website to my portfolio as an example of my work. Feel free to send me a PM and we can take it from there. I hope this post was helpful and made you start thinking of the value you are offering to your customers. submitted by /u/LaptopAddicted [link] [comments]