When you start a business, advertising is a vital part of growth, and you should plan as such. Today, there are many places where you can advertise, and each has its quirks. Learning how to advertise on each particular platform can lead to spectacular results. It’s just not for me.
I own a blog and book publishing business. I write articles and bundle them together to form books. I love to write and find creating books and book covers to be a challenging addition to the world of writing.
When I first started to read books about book publishing, I fell into the trap of growing my brand. What I failed to realize is that the authors of these fantastic books were full-time writers. They wrote to make a living. I am a full-time US Marine of 22 years—that’s how I make a living.
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Some of the books I read relating to writing books and publishing are “Creating Income Streams,” “How to Make a Living with Your Writing,” “How to Market a Book,” and “The Relaxed Author.”
I gained valuable insight into the world of writing and publishing from these books, and they helped me prepare for the long journey of authorship. However, I got caught up in the minutiae of running ads.
There are two ways to sell books: run ads or publish a lot of books. Those are your two options. To decide which of the two options best suits your lifestyle, you will need to know your long-term goals. But let me get into my experience running Facebook ads first.
I freely admit that when I first started running Facebook ads, I had no clue what I was doing. I had no design experience, no advertising experience, and my book covers weren’t great. Overall, I sucked.
So I read a book on design (“The Non-Designer’s Design Book”), a book advertising (“Cashvertising”), and a book on Facebook Ads (“Help! My Facebook Ads Suck”). After all of this reading, my ads started to improve.
At first, it is impressive to start getting traffic to your blog—it’s like someone is shining a light on your corner of the internet. I was advertising my blog posts and had some links to my books on Amazon as well. I did see an uptick in sales of my books.
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I admit, my blog and books would have grown much more had I continued to advertise. However, some things struck me along the way. First, I had to re-evaluate my long-term goals. I didn’t start writing to become famous or even to become rich.
I started writing to build up a passive income from royalties. I knew that having cash flow outside of my pension, dividends, and rents would be vital to my cash flow retirement plan. I wasn’t born a writer or a “Creative,” I am doing this for more practical reasons.
Second, running ads is a career in and of itself. To create an ad that makes you money, you need to align all the elements. Your cover, title, description, copy, and blurb all need to come together almost perfectly. Then you have to find what segment, times, countries, and other elements of the cohort you are trying to reach.
Once you have a great ad and the right segment to show your ad to, you must do the same for your book. It needs to have a great cover, blurb, and price. If you don’t have a solid book, people will arrive at your site and not convert (buy your product) well.
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All this time, you are spending money to figure all this out. It sounds fun, but it is the exact opposite of fun. I love the art of writing and creating, but running ads is the art of trying to maximize profits. It’s not how I want to focus my time.
Lastly, the people that arrive at your site “aren’t your people.” I forgot what book said that line, perhaps “Superfans,” but it stuck with me. You bring all these random strangers to your site, and they don’t want to get to know you. They just saw something they may like and ran through your site with no remorse. They are not your people.
Sure, running ads allows some good folks to find you, but that is few and far between. This reason is why I honestly stopped running ads. Google keeps a statistic called “average time on page” that shows up on your blog dashboard.
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Before I started running ads, my stat was roughly 2 minutes and 3 seconds. So people were reading my articles. When ads began running, that number started to plummet. In fact, it got all the way down to 45 seconds. It was embarrassing; worse, I was paying for shame. Once I saw this number going down, I knew that running ads was not for me. These were not my people.
I stopped running ads roughly two months ago, and today I am sitting at 3 minutes and 8 seconds “average time on page.” I am finding my people organically. I love seeing my books and blogs growing organically—I am doing this for the long term.
In all, after reading books and getting my act together, I spent roughly $300 on Facebook Ads. The crap I was doing before does not count because I did invest my time correctly. With more experience, I know that I could create a money-making ad.
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If you can build an ad that makes money, then your business could be in an infinite return. That means that you could create a great ad and start printing money just from advertising. It is more than possible; the question is how much time you want to dedicate to advertising.
What are some other options? There are many ways to get people to your blogs, books, or business. Learning about search engine optimization is a great way to get free traffic to your site. That is why I read the book “Product-Led SEO.” Again, this is a long road as well.
Creating content is the number one way to grow your business. No matter what business you start, you should be producing as much QUALITY content as you can. The book “Content, Inc” talks about creating content before you even release a product, and I tend to agree.
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I am working my butt off to create a content-based business. I write and publish every single day. Eventually, I will have a great audience of people. If I decide to release an online course about book publishing, I have built an audience to consider this product. If I choose to release an online course on building a dividend growth portfolio, I have an audience that may receive it well.
So, to me, when you advertise, you are not building an audience. You’re getting “cheap” eyeballs and maybe sales. Maybe one person out of a hundred becomes a fan of yours, but the vast majority will never see you again. That was my takeaway from advertising. That won’t be everyone’s truth, and it does depend on your product and your goal.
Still, I believe that creating content is the best way to build an audience. Once you learn how to write, advertise, design, and market products, your content can serve as a way to get in front of good eyeballs. You want to find quality people who like you for you—don’t take a shortcut if not necessary.
Welcome to Stress Freedom
Conclusion. Advertising, at this point in my writing career, is not for me. I enjoy the passive income grind of releasing a ton of content. I also learned how to relax and understand that building an audience takes years (10,000 hours, at minimum).
If you want to run Facebook ads (or other platforms), please take the time to read books or take courses on the subject. If you release one book a year, you probably need to advertise your products.
Earned Income vs. Passive Income
If creating a never-ending stream of content is more your thing, ensure you have a day job. Then prepare for the long run. You will gain an audience if you keep releasing content; it’ll just take a while for this to come to fruition.
However, every new member, book sale, page view, etc., counts when you build something organically! It is a big deal when you go from three page views a month to three a day. You don’t need to see these vast numbers because you are slowly finding your people, and that is worth the time and effort of creating content.
You can find all of my content on my blog. Everything I write is for free there. I also publish it to Amazon and bundle it in free pdfs here. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.
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