How we help you ignite the fire within

I don’t even need to imagine how most people who run their own businesses stress out a lot about marketing, especially Facebook marketing. Having run my own Facebook agency for years, I know what it means to run good ads. However, there is a time and a moment in which you should not advertise on Facebook. That moment is when whatever budget you’ve assigned to it, you can’t afford to lose.

A really nice rule of thumb is if your business is making less than $100,000 per year, do not market on Facebook. You have to sink money in that you have to be willing to lose, because you’re going to do testing, and testing doesn’t always work. You have to be okay to lose money in order to make money.

When you do finally reach the point to invest in Facebook advertising because you’ve got the right financials, you should still learn to do it yourself. There’s an ROI calculation I always made my clients do when they were looking at engaging me as their agency. That calculation asks what do you need to learn, how complicated is it, and how long will it take you to learn? Then how long will it take you to manage that month-to-month? Compare that to how much is an agency charging you. When you’re working with an agency, you have to cover not only the cost of the agency, but then also the cost of your ad budget on top of the agency. So, now you’ve kind of got a little bit of a steeper hill to climb. For many, many businesses, they don’t actually even break even on those, they actually end up losing money. They say, “You’re getting a positive ROI on your Facebook ad spend.” But when you add the agency fee on top of that, most often you’re actually at a deficit.

I would not pay for a company to help me with my advertising until I made $1,000,000 in revenue. That is because when you really get down to it, there are some great training products out there. I’ve got training products I provide to people that show you how to run ads. As long as you approach it logically, it’s really not that complicated.

I was talking to someone today and he asked, “Okay, well if I don’t run ads, and I have a new business, what am I going to do?” He was wondering how he should go about raising awareness and getting actual sales. Here are a couple options:

Affiliate Marketing

There’s a wonderful book called The Dream 100 by Dana Derricks and it will show you exactly how you need to engage in affiliate marketing.

A lot of people think companies like ClickFunnels became the size they are today because of Facebook ads. They are wrong. ClickFunnels didn’t do Facebook ads until it was making millions of dollars in revenue. ClickFunnels grew by using the affiliate marketing strategy.

But how does the affiliate marketing strategy work? Say, for instance, you have an online product. There’s someone else who has an online product that is similar to yours, but not competing. What you do is you say, “Hey, other person, I would really love for you to promote my product with your product, so every time someone buys yours, they’re also buying mine too. And I’ll give you 50% of the revenue.” Everybody wins. You can do the same with them.

You can run challenges using your affiliate marketing strategy. One of the greatest things you can run right now is one of two things. One is called the 4 Day Cash Machine, which is where you make an offer to your database, and you run it for only four days. It’s usually got some sort of a deep discount in it. The second thing you can do is run a seven day challenge. In both of these you are making an offer and you’re trying to make money. You can run these challenges, or run these cash machines, with other affiliates. This is how ClickFunnels grew.

I just gave you the formula. So if you do that, and nothing else, you will grow your email base list, you will make a ton of sales, and you’ll be able to earn enough money so that eventually you can invest in Facebook advertising.

Cross Marketing

If affiliate marketing isn’t for you, you need to consider cross marketing. In this instance, you go to someone and say, “Hey, can you sell this? If you sell this, I’ll sell yours.” This is usually promotion based and centred around sending emails. So, you’d give emails to people that are advertising your product, they would send it to their database, and then vice versa. This is a more short-term option – it’s not going to get you to grow quite in the same way affiliate marketing will.

What you’re really looking for is a way to make money without lifting a finger. And I don’t know if you’ve ever done Facebook ads, but you have to lift a lot more than just a finger. Affiliate marketing, cross marketing, and videos will drive people into your sales funnel.

The reason I’m not promoting anything right now, is my sales funnel is coming. Right now, I’m trying to give you guys good content you can trust. Content that you can depend on. Content that you feel is useful, that you can then immediately apply to your business. That is what I am here for.

One of the reasons why I’ve stepped away from actually doing Facebook ads on behalf of people is that it was causing more stress and more problems for them than it was solving. I could generate anywhere from 20 to 50 leads a week. That’s great, but if you don’t have a system to convert those, it is overwhelming, and eventually becomes very demoralizing. And that was happening again and again to my clients. It’s really difficult, so what I have done is I’ve taken a step back and now I focus on the whole business. Where are you best performing, where do you have a capability gap, and how do we get you to your best performing self? How do we get you to the self that you’re so incredibly proud of every single day?

Remember you’ve always got your email database – and as you get more and more traction, as more and more people know who you are, your email database should grow as you create your cross promotions. Your customer base will grow, and of course they come into your email database, and you can continue to sell these people. You can create referral programs using systems like ClickFunnels or UpViral, two ways of leveraging other people’s networks to get you more people into your database.

The moral of the story is, I know everyone feels like you have to advertise on Facebook, and that is not actually the case. You don’t. There are a ton of other opportunities for you to find other ways to market your business. Other ways, for free, that you can grow, and expand what it is that you do, and make a ton of money in the meantime.

Are you doing affiliated, integrated, or cross-marketing? Drop a comment below, I’d love to hear from you! Have a great day.